Warming Up :: Personal Narrative Papers

Warming Up "Why is it always so cold in here?" I said, aiming my voice in the direction of my parents. "It's only 68," was the invariable response from one of them. "That's room temperature." I couldn't understand why they kept the house so cold in the winter, 68 degrees during the day, 66 at night. "It's more economical to keep the house at this temperature," my dad would tell me. How much money could it cost to heat the house a few degrees more? Even though I was sure our finances would not suffer if we used more heat, I never thought of my family as rich. Rather, by comparing my family with some of my friends' families, I thought we were comparatively poor. We never had many luxuries; even our house was spartan. A few years ago, my dad and stepmom bought a plot of land in a new subdivision and designed a house. After it was built, it was obvious that we had the plainest house in the cul-de-sac. It was a one-story house with conservative beige siding and absolutely nothing fancy to make it stand out. All the other houses had two stories or decorative rows of brickwork or beautiful gables on the roof. I knew that these kinds of decorations did not come cheap, and I thought that all our neighbors must be very rich to be able to build such fancy houses. If our house was not ornate, it was certainly well kept. My dad or I mowed the yard frequently so the grass wouldn't look ragged. Neat flowerbeds encircled the house, giving it the proper, orderly look that convention demanded. Most adults I knew looked down on houses that did not meet this standard. "It's too bad they couldn't fix that siding; it would be a nice house otherwise," I would hear while passing a run-down home. Or someone else would say, "Can't that family mow their lawn? Look how bad the neighborhood looks because of that one yard." My world was clean and tidy, organized and proper. I had spent all of my 16 years in the same town, raised with a standard of propriety. I knew, in an abstract sense, that there was poverty in the world. Even so, I thought my family was, if not poor, at least poorer than most families. But I rarely thought about poverty or living conditions at all.