My family was homeless a few times when I was a kid, and my sister and I had fun with it - we got to do some pretty cool stuff that most kids don't. I was kind of a funny kid though, I never could control my mouth. This one time we had been living at a campground for awhile, fishing everyday for food when a game warden came by. He starts asking my sister and I about how many fish we had been catching and things like that. I guess some busybody had called him and told him about us, so he says, "Someone says you have X number of fish, (I don't remember how many) at your camp, is that true?" And I said, "Well, we did have that many, but not anymore. We ate them all," while my sister is nudging me and trying to get me to shut up. Anyway, he didn't do anything - just talked to my parents, and gave them a warning, which ended up being more or less a warning to be more careful in not getting caught fishing illegally.

When I was homeless on my own I was only 17, and although I didn't expect it, people helped me out of nowhere. The car I had was a gift from basically strangers that had met me a couple times. I was able to work enough that I could feed myself and keep gas in the car, but not much else. But when my brakes went out on the car, someone fixed them for free for me. It seemed that there were generous people everywhere even though I didn't ask for it. It wasn't that bad - actually I really enjoyed it, because it was kind of awesome being away from my family and on my own. It was just me, and there was, like anndelise said a sense of freedom that you do lose when you tie yourself to a place.

Anyway, when I was homeless, and when my family was, we were never street people or beggars or anything like that. We were just poor and had no place to live.