Sheila Garrett says:

Kinda pointless to lock the gate when the fence is gone.

I get it, but I can feel the energy drain right in the middle of that section of hip-high grass.

Grammy said they wouldn’t be able to close the gate after they’d gone through. All they could do was to build a fence and make sure nothing was visible on this side.

I miss them so much. But my folks were on the government’s side and they said I was too young to be serious about Peter.

I crawl through the gap in the fence.

Leigh Kimmel says:

The first sign of trouble was coming home on the bus and seeing the Wilkensons’ gate padlocked shut. Sure, they had a big, fancy fence around their place, but until that day, it had always been for show, with the gate open wide so you could come right up their big circle drive. But within a week the spring grass was growing taller than they ever tolerated.

A week or so later, the Vandenwalts’ place was starting to look neglected, with the bright golden eyes of dandelions everywhere. Looking closer, I could see a funny box on the knob of their front door, and I tried to remember the last time I’d seen a car there.

I asked my dad what was going on, and he said a bunch of words about how we made stuff stretch instead of buying new. I didn’t understand what it had to do with the big, fancy houses that were now empty, but this was in a day and age when you did not talk back, so I nodded my head and said some grateful-sounding words.

Looking back, I’m thinking those families were way over-leveraged. Some of them may have been old money, but they’d borrowed on it to keep up their standards of living. And when the economy soured, they didn’t have any reserves to carry them through. But that would be a lot for a kid in grade school to understand, so he gave me a lesson about the importance of making do instead, and hoped it would help.