My father passed away when I was little and my mother remarried an alcoholic who usually drank most of his wages.
It wasn’t uncommon for us to go without a necessity or two, like sufficient heat.
We had a gas furnace in the little old trailer Mama owned but when the gas tank was empty, it didn’t always get refilled right away, and all we had was one little space heater that did almost nothing to combat the freezing temperatures. One space heater for three people in a two-bedroom trailer.We would keep the space heater near the TV in the living room and that’s where I would do my homework and where we would eat our meals. At night, Mama would let me take the space heater in my room with me, but it was never enough to make me warm. To this day, I hate being cold. Which is why I’m so grateful to have the husband I have. I married into money and we have a nice home with a fine HVAC system. We have a geothermal heat pump, two fireplaces, and radiant heated floors. Some people might consider this obsessive. Why get radiant heated floors when you have a geothermal heat pump? To be honest, sometimes the heat pump is a little slow to heat the house and we utilize the radiant heated floors to heat the home if the geothermal heat pump has been off for a while, which is often. During the cool days of spring and fall, I open up the house during the day and heat the home with radiant heated floors at night. We usually save the heat pump for winter and summer weather. And I will never be cold again.