Just a random collection of my thoughts.

YA'LL I FIGURED IT OUT I GOT IT

I didn't censor anything, what -

oh. Oh, no. That's meant to be a line to show where the tail begins. Oh no, now I look like some weird prude.

no one mourns the wicked

My closest neighbors did not have running water or electricity in their home. (There was a nearby creek; they got water from that.)

In the entire school - about 500 students, grades K-12, from three nearby towns - I think there were one or two students who paid for lunches. Everyone else got free lunch because the entire region was so far below the poverty line. I don't think the lunchroom had a cashier. I vaguely heard of students needing to pay for lunch; I assume their families made arrangements.

The schools scheduled extra days off in November, around Thanksgiving - when hunting season started - because a notable number of students would vanish for a few days, because those families needed that turkey or deer meat to survive the winter.

Also. Under-18s didn't need a license to hunt, or the license was cheaper, I forget. So it was important to the families to have the kill registered to the teenager rather than the adult, because they couldn't afford the cost of an adult license.

I don't mean family heirlooms that feel like junk but that you can't get rid of because they're important. I mean the opposite -- things of no importance that were passed down through generations incidentally.

My grandmother owned a dish towel with a distinct checkerboard pattern. It wasn't important to her, just one of many dish towels. When she died my parents kept some of her stuff because of sentimental value, but some just because it was perfectly fine stuff they could use, and they ended up with it.

Years later I was moving to another state and my parents asked if I needed any old towels since they were getting new ones. I got a box of rags, which included my grandmother's dish towel (which had been downgraded to 'rag' by then, tbh it was in that category even when my grandmother owned it.) I literally have a rag that's been passed down through multiple generations.