http://ipraudio.interlochen.org/Smith_Family.mp3
Heading into this holiday weekend, Thanksgiving reminds reporter Linda Stephan of a family she met this year in Ludington. The Smiths are a tight-knit group, and they won't have to travel far to find one another. More in this series here.
"We just keep in mind that it's temporary and it's for the better."
Heather Smith sits on the floor in her parents' living room. She's 21-years-old and the mother of two. This year she had to move her whole family back to her parents' Ludington home, a modest 1,000-square-foot ranch with three bedrooms. Heather and her kids take one room in the house, her parents have another, and the third room goes to Heather's 16-year-old sister.
"It's tight," Heather Smith says of the arrangement. "It's hard sometimes on everyone because so many people in such a little space. But I do everything I can to help around the house and give rides and I'll do everything I possibly can."
Sixteen-year-old Angela Smith says sometimes she feels bad watching Heather do so much work around the house.
"But then she just tells me, 'No, I'll do it, because we're not paying rent or anything.'"
Angela says her family has always been close, and she can't imagine getting through life without her two older sisters.
"Especially being in high school right now, I don't think I would be able to do it. I always go to them for advice, always," she laughs. "On everything: school, friends, boys."
For quite a while now, the entire Smith family has been struggling. With no way to afford health insurance, the family is paying medical bills a little at a time each month, and Angela and Heather's parents have also struggled at times to make the house payment. Pam and Robert Smith are just eight years from owning this manufactured home outright. It's seated on family land.
Pam Smith says the family has come dangerously close to foreclosure proceedings.
"And we saved it, barely," she says. "But it meant selling things we didn't want to sell, doing what we had to do. But so far we've managed. It's been tough, it's been really tough. It's been a lot of going without a lot of things."
Every single member of the Smith family, in turn, has been in and out of work, as the state continues to lead the nation in the number of people unemployed. I first met Pam Smith at a job she was working in Baldwin. It was a 45-minute commute for her to work there, at Video Schmideo for nine-dollars-an-hour. She had the job about a year, until business slowed so much the owners said they really could only afford to hire family. Pam was laid off.
Luckily her husband, Robert Smith, has had some work this fall. But for much of the year he hasn't. Construction's slow, and Robert's worked concrete 15 years.
"And when you go from making $50,000 a year to making nothing you learn where your priorities are, the things that got to happen in order to survive. So we had no choice but to go sign up for food stamps, to get help just so we could eat."
Besides government food assistance, the family has been penny-pinching every purchase down to toilet paper, and Robert does what he can to fix the car himself when it breaks down.
But mostly this family says success in making it through the lean times is more about leaning on one another than anything else. Without that support, Heather and her two daughters, ages one and three, might have found themselves homeless this summer. Now Heather has work, and she's getting a place of her own once again.
"A while back when I was still living on my own and I had it a little better off than these guys, I would do anything I possibly could to help them," Heather says. "Like rides through the winter, help with groceries, anything. And then, a couple of months later they ended up having it better off than I did and I was stuck in a rut, so they would help me out with rides and with groceries and everything like that."
"We always have worked together to accomplish what we need accomplished," mom, Pam Smith says.
Ludington has always been home to this family. Robert's parents also live in a house on this very same property. But the question has come up: whether things are bad enough in Michigan that Pam and Robert may have to leave, at least temporarily, and find work elsewhere just in order to hold onto the family house.
"That's always a thought in the head," Pam says.
"Not in my head!" Sixteen-year-old Angela interrupts her mother. The family has talked about this often.
"I don't want to move out of state, especially this far in school" says Angela. " I've grown up with these people my whole life, went to school with these people my whole life and then to have two years left in high school and have to move would really suck."
Heather agrees with her younger sister on this one.
"Just because here you have family, you have people you to rely on," she says. "You have friends. If I move to a different state where I don't know anyone, I don't have anybody to do that for me. So the economy may be a little bit better there, but then I don't have any help. I don't have any support."
Heather, Pam, Angela and Robert say, with all stress and tight quarters, they've had their "little spats" this year. But mostly they're just thankful for one another, for family they can rely on in good times and in struggle. May we all be so blessed.
Happy Thanksgiving.