Love Poems and Sad Stories - The Winter Coat

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Forced to grow up too fast (Graduation), a young woman manages to escape from an abusive marriage (The Five Dollar Gold Piece) and returns with her two small children to her parents farm in North Central Wisconsin.

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She is forced to watch her children go Hungry (The Church Picnic) and is finally returned by the county to Milwaukee (The Train Ride).

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She manages to re-marry just as the Great Depression begins. Her husband soon loses his job and is forced to gather (Rags, Bottles and Paper) to feed his family.

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Now, she has to keep her fourteen year old daughter home from school because she doesn't have a winter coat to wear.

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The Winter Coat

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She sat in the darkened room with the shades drawn, still in shock over the events that had taken place over the past few weeks. It all began when the weather started to grow cold and she had to keep her daughter, Geraldine, home from school because she didn’t have a winter coat to wear. At age fourteen, her daughter had outgrown the tattered coat that she had worn the year before and they didn’t have any money to buy her a new one.

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The Depression had left a lot of people unemployed and her husband had been reduced to combing through rich people’s garbage for anything usable that he could sell to help put food on the table.While it was true that the county helped pay their rent and supplied them with flour, potatoes, cabbages and lard, there was no money to buy clothes.

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She had gone to the Red Cross and the welfare department and begged them for a coat for her daughter, but they all told her that she had to wait her turn – everyone else needed things too. Meanwhile, her daughter stayed home each day and tried to study from the one book that she had managed to bring home with her on the last day she had gone to school.

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Each week, the woman had contacted the agencies asking when they would have a coat and each week the answer was the same "You are still on the list and we will let you know when we find one". And then, to make matters worse her daughter had suddenly become ill. The pain in her side had begun slowly at first and kept getting worse until they finally had no choice but to take her to the county hospital. The doctor had said that she had a ruptured appendix and had rushed her into surgery.

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What happened next was all a blur. The doctor came and told her that her daughter had died on the operating table. The woman screamed and fell on the floor. Only a few days ago she had had a healthy fourteen-year-old daughter, and now they would be looking for a place to bury her.

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Fortunately, they found a funeral parlor that agreed to do the job for twenty-five dollars down and a small monthly payment over the next two years. The county had provided a simple pine coffin and an unmarked grave in the pauper’s cemetery. The ground had not frozen too deep yet, so the gravediggers were able to dig the hole. It had happened so fast that it all seemed to run together in her mind.

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Now she sat alone in the darkened room with tears trickling down her cheeks thinking about a daughter that she would never see again and an unmarked grave with only a patch of dirt to protect it from the snow. Suddenly, she heard a knock at the door jarring her back to reality. Maybe if she didn’t answer it, whoever was there would go away. But the knocking only got louder and finally she pulled herself together and struggled to open the door. When she finally opened it she was shocked to see the lady from the welfare agency standing there. The woman was smiling as she said, "Good news ma’am. We finally found a coat for your daughter. Now she can go to school". In her arms the woman was holding a winter coat.

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In memory of my step-sister, Geraldine Johnson. She won't need a coat in heaven.

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The young woman and her family, manage to survive the Depression and have finally moved back to North Central Wisconsin where they buy an old house on an acre of land where they can grow vegetables and a few chickens.

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Life gradually begins to get better until 1946, when the next chapter takes place.

Sad Stories - Halloween

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