Johanna Scanlon has been on my mind, lately. I’ve been thinking of her because I have been diagnosed with osteopenia, “a condition characterized by lower-than-normal bone density, which can increase the risk of fractures and may progress to osteoporosis if not managed.” I believe Johanna suffered from osteoporosis.
I felt sorry for Johanna all the while we lived next door. She was more than poor; she lived in poverty. She would leave her back door and walk down her yard with a cane. She was so hunched over that I was often wondering if she might fall forward. She left her house only to get her mail at the Post Office and pick up a few groceries, no more than she could carry three blocks.
Her back yard sloped toward the alley, and I could figure out that the path down the middle of her backyard was raised and separated what had to have been two gardens at one time. When I mowed our yard, I mowed her front yard, but the backyard had turned to what some would call weeds. I viewed it as prairie.
One very cold winter day, Johanna summoned me from her back door. She was standing on the platform at the top of her outdoor stairs to the yard. I walked over to see what she needed. She handed me a pail and asked if I could drain some heating oil from a 50-gallon drum on its side from below the platform and bring it into her home. I had never done this before, and I had never seen anyone else perform the task.
I brought the heating oil up the steps and, as she opened the door, asked me to set it by the small old oil burning stove in the middle of the room. The house was cold! The oil burning stove was in what I would label as the kitchen, but I saw no refrigerator, no stove – not even a cook stove, but only a small table with two white chairs abutting the window in the back side of the house. I could see her sitting at the window day after day reading. However, the only thing to read in that room was a stack of papers; shoppers – not newspapers. I have to assume that she used them to burn in the oil burning stove.
The kitchen was cut off from the rest of the house with a blanket hanging over what had to be a doorway to another room, most likely the living room. When I think about it, I had never noticed lights on in her home.
Johanna was a sweet old woman. She often had a smile on her face, even though it must have been difficult for her. She was not poor; she was living in poverty.
As I get older, I notice that there is a huge difference between being poor and living in poverty. Sadly, not everyone understands the difference.
Poor is not having a good enough credit score to finance the purchase a used car. Poverty is not having a credit score, a credit card, a car, or a house.
Poor is when you are in college and you have to eat tuna, like candidate Willard Mitt Romney’s claimed when he ran for President in 2012. Or, poor is when you ran out of beer and payday isn’t for another day or two. Poor is temporary; poverty is a lifetime.
Former Iowa State Representative Wayne Ford told me that poverty is a constant struggle to move up, rarely making it.
There is a cliché that goes: “Pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” It’s meant to encourage poor people to strive for success. However, people living in poverty have no bootstraps; they have no boots; some barely have decent socks. Some people have nothing but a half-gallon of heating oil, some old shoppers, and cold solitude.
Related blog: https://iowappa.com/?p=1977
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