When I was a kid my Mother took me to a babysitter, up the street, in a larger trailer park than the one I lived in. I knew nothing of the working poor or social services then, but I knew that my babysitter really only valued a few items in her home—one was the wooden table in her kitchen and the other were ceramic items, like the ceramic mugs she and other women drank coffee from, with oddly large, orange-headed mushrooms on them; after all, it was the seventies. I don’t remember how or why I came to know that one of the women in the neighborhood had been hurt by her husband, and I don’t know where she disappeared to, but I knew these women overlooking these children and mushroomed, ceramic coffee cups, had something to do with her leaving, and I had a vague feeling that woman’s safety had somehow been secured. It was the first time I really felt the power of a community of women.
