I have five siblings.
I have four brothers and a sister, and I am the youngest of the bunch.
MY dad passed away when I was two years old and my oldest brother was fourteen years old. The rest fell in between the two ages. That left my mom to raise six kids by herself. As you can imagine, it was probably pretty hard. I didn’t really realize it, though. I never lacked faith in my mom, and she didn’t complain and tell me all her troubles all the time. She just got on with it. We lived in the northeast, and we had a really large house. My mom and dad bought it for a steal because it had sat vacant for a long time, and it hadn’t been completely finished. My dad and his friends had to put in the cabinets, the wiring, some of the flooring, and who knows what else. That was all before I was born. After my dad died, though, my mom struggled to keep up with the house. It was so big. She could manage the mortgage payments okay, but it is extremely expensive to keep the heater going in a house that size. I didn’t know anything about furnaces and such, as I was just a kid, but I know now. It costs a fortune to have the heating guy come out with fuel oil for the furnace and fill up the furnace oil tank. I’m sure that has to be done more than once a year, too. Let’s face it, when you are heating a big house, heating is expensive.