I understand poverty because I live poverty.  Officially.  My income numbers, as a single mother, are bona fide poverty numbers.  We qualified for reduced price school lunches and medicaid.  My daughter gets a fine financial aid package from the expensive private school she very deservedly attends.  We get hand-outs from the church, without even asking for them!  And while I might live a life officially labeled as that of the 'working poor', I am, most assuredly, not poor.

 No, I can't afford a car and walk most everywhere, except for when I can get a ride.   It's true I don't leave this village very often.  I live on the side of a very steep hill rising up from the river, and I am quite fit from hauling groceries up that hill home after work.  I am a regular beast of burden, sleek and strong.  And tired!  Make no mistake, I know tired.  I work 2, sometimes 3, jobs, besides caring for my house.  But tired is a friendly companion like any other, giving me the most perfect reason to avoid even more tiring social encounters!

 I keep the thermostat low, here in the frozen north.  I dress in layers.  I fill the cracks in the back door with those free newspapers that arrive weekly.

 I cook up a big pot of beans every Sunday and eat burritos all week.  

I have a simplified sense of need.  I am naturally not materialistic.  I also have this annoying habit of counting my blessings.  

And, I have no portfolio to mourn now that the economic shit has hit the fan.  Recession?  What recession?  My economic life, my economic reality, has been a recession for so long now I probably know no other way of functioning.   

 I have been blessed with the gift of crow sight, an affinity for shiny treasure, and so, I am a natural scavenger, whose eyes are always seeking free, usable stuff--albeit unconsciously. 

 I guess it is also true that I am just a piss-poor capitalist and a woman who made bad relationship choices, and yet, somehow I manage, just like the little birds out in the ever deepening snow and the single digit temperatures.  They fluff up their feathers, stick together, nibble at seeds, and keep singing.