fourteen, my little sister, Ocy, was twelve and my
older sister, Darlene, was sixteen.
We lived at home with our mother, and the four of us knew what it was
to do without. My dad had died five years before,
leaving Mom with no money and seven school-aged kids
to raise.
By 1946, my older sisters were married and my brothers had left home. A month before Easter, the pastor of our church announced that a special
holiday offering would be taken to help a poor family. He asked everyone to save and give
sacrificially.
When we got home, we talked about what we could do. We decided to buy fifty pounds of potatoes and live on them for a month. This would allow us to
save twenty dollars of our grocery money for the
offering.
Then we thought that if we kept our electric lights
turned out as much as possible and didn't listen to
the radio, we'd save money on that month's electric
bill. Darlene got as many house- and yard-cleaning
jobs as possible, and both of us baby-sat for
everyone we could.
For fifteen cents we could buy enough cotton loops to
make three potholders to sell for a dollar. We made
twenty dollars on potholders. That month was one of
the best of our lives.
Every day we counted the money to see how much we had saved. At night we'd sit in the dark and talk about how the poor family was going to enjoy
having the money the church would give them.
We had about eighty people in church, so we figured
that whatever amount of money we had to give, the
offering would surely be twenty times that much.
After all, every Sunday the pastor had reminded
everyone to save for the sacrificial offering.
The night before Easter, we were so excited we could hardly sleep. We didn't care that we
wouldn't have new clothes for Easter; we had seventy
dollars for the sacrificial offering.
We could hardly wait to get to church! On Sunday
morning, rain was pouring. We didn't own an umbrella,
and the church was over a mile from our home, but it
didn't seem to matter how wet we got.
Darlene had cardboard in her shoes to fill the holes.
The cardboard came apart, and her feet got wet.
But we sat in church proudly. I heard
some teenagers talking about our old dresses. I
looked at them in their new clothes, and I felt rich.
When the sacrificial offering was taken, we were sitting in the second row from the front. Mom put in the ten-dollar bill, and each of us kids put
in a twenty-dollar bill.
We sang all the way home from church. At lunch, Mom had a surprise for us. She had bought a dozen eggs, and we had boiled Easter eggs with our
fried potatoes! Late that afternoon, the minister
drove up in his car.
Mom went to the door, talked with him for a moment,
and then came back with an envelope in her hand. We
asked what it was, but she didn't say a word.
She opened the envelope and out fell a bunch of
money. There were three crisp twenty-dollar bills,
one ten-dollar bill and seventeen one-dollar bills.
Mom put the money back in the envelope. We didn't talk, just sat and stared at the floor. We had gone from feeling like millionaires to feeling
poor.
We kids had such a happy life that we felt sorry for
anyone who didn't have our Mom and our late Dad for
parents and a house full of brothers and sisters and
other kids visiting constantly.
We thought it was fun to share silverware and see
whether we got the spoon or the fork that night. We
had two knives that we passed around to whoever
needed them. I knew we didn't have a lot of things
that other people had, but I'd never thought we were
poor.
That Easter day I found out we were. The
minister had brought us the money for the poor
family, so we must be poor, I thought. I didn't like
being poor.
I looked at my dress and worn-out shoes and felt so
ashamed -- I didn't even want to go back to church.
Everyone there probably already knew we were poor!
I thought about school. I was in the
ninth grade and at the top of my class of over one
hundred students.
I wondered if the kids at school knew that we were
poor. I decided that I could quit school since I had
finished the eighth grade. That was all the law
required at that time.
We sat in silence for a long time. Then
it got dark, and we went to bed. All that week, we
girls went to school and came home, and no one talked
much. Finally, on Saturday, Mom asked us what we
wanted to do with the money.
What did poor people do with money? We didn't know.
We'd never known we were poor. We didn't want to go
to church on Sunday, but Mom said we had to. Although
it was a sunny day, we didn't talk on the way. Mom
started to sing, but no one joined in, and she sang
only one verse.
At church we had a missionary speaker. He talked about how churches in Africa made buildings out of sun-dried bricks, but they needed money to buy
roofs. He said one hundred dollars would put a roof
on a church.
The minister added, "Can't we all sacrifice to help
these poor people?" We looked at each other and
smiled for the first time in a week.
Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the envelope. She passed it to Darlene. Darlene gave it to me, and I handed it to Ocy. Ocy put it in the
offering.
When the offering was counted, the minister announced that it was a little over one
hundred dollars. The missionary was excited. He
hadn't expected such a large offering from our small
church.
He said, "You must have some rich people in this
church." Suddenly it struck us! We had given
eighty-seven dollars of that "little over one hundred
dollars."
We were the rich family in the church! Hadn't the missionary said so? From that day on, I've never been poor again.
By Eddie Ogan
ENCHANTED MERMAID'S GROTTO
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