AT THE CAMPGROUND IN JUNE 2008: Kylee and Lindsey Jordan and their mother, Karen, bed down at Burlingame State Campground, where they stayed until they were able to secure an apartment. They went to Burlingame after a stint in a motel that followed a foreclosure in March. The Providence Journal / John Freidah

The metal door of storage unit 140 at the Self Storage Center in Richmond opens to reveal a jumble of boxes and furniture leaning against one another at odd angles.

Karen and Harry Jordan go to work, pulling out boxes, chairs and lamps from the labyrinth.

Their young daughters, Kylee and Lindsey, scour for long-forgotten treasures: books, toys, Lindsey’s pink “Secrets of a Diva” journal.

Sitting amid the boxes, 8-year-old Lindsey flips open a page of the journal and writes her first entry in neat cursive: “I am happy.”

Last summer, after nearly half a year, the Jordan family finally has an address, a second-floor apartment nestled between a former brownfield and the train tracks in Charlestown. They have a place for their possessions, a place to do homework, a place to call their own.

THE JORDANS’ SAGA began in March 2008, when foreclosure on a house in Hopkinton they shared with relatives forced them to cram everything they could into the storage unit and move into a single motel room. They chose the Blue Star Motor Inn in Westerly, one of the many motels in South County that offer low weekly rates in the off-season.

The family lived on Harry Jordan’s $320 weekly take-home pay, turned to food pantries for help, and borrowed from relatives and friends.

Karen Jordan struggled to keep the girls “on track.” She kept meals on schedule, relying on a mini-fridge, a hotplate and the motel microwave.

They slept on the twin-size mattresses –– piled atop the motel beds or on the floor –– that they had saved from the house.

“It was hard,” Karen recalls. “I mean, we lived day to day.”

Still, she said, “Life goes on, no matter where you are. Their routine has to remain the same.”

During the week, she tried to make sure the girls got their sleep so they could wake up in time for school.

But with one ornery car, which often conked out, the Jordans still failed to get them to Richmond some days.

When he could, Harry would get a ride to work as a baler at Garrity Industries, a packing and distribution facility for flashlights and lanterns, in Hopkinton. By going with Karen to drop off the girls first, he would be late for work.

And, there were days when there was no money for gas.

On those days, the girls stayed “home.”

WITH THE ARRIVAL of tourist season their weekly rent jumped from $195 to $300. On June 1, 2008, the Jordans were on the move again.

They crammed their beat-up Ford Explorer, a remnant of better days, with boxes and bins competing for space with four cats, a dog and a rabbit.

The mattresses, tied to the top, flapped in the wind as they headed for Burlingame State Campground, in Charlestown. At campsite 84, they moved into a tent –– billed as a “vacation cottage” fit for six, the box says.

They slept on the twin-size mattresses, amid the animal cages and their boxes and bins, and shared a nearby public bathroom with other campers.

Without electricity, Kylee and Lindsey did their homework on a wooden picnic table.

It was “horrible,” Lindsey recalls now, almost a year later. “I would have to sit down on a big table” that “was all lumpy, so every time I wrote on it, it was all garbly.”

When dark, gloomy weather hit, they moved into the tent and lit a lantern or used flashlights from Harry’s employer.

Campers sometimes threw late-night parties, keeping the girls awake and making it difficult to get up in the morning.

The girls missed more school.

“I would sleep in and plus, the tent was too small, so I couldn’t find clothes,” Lindsey says.

Karen insisted on driving them to school, unaware that, under federal law, she could have asked the Chariho regional school district to provide transportation for her children.

When they made it to class, they were often late because her mom always had to stop for gas, Kylee says.

LINDSEY DIDN’T tell anyone at school about their homelessness “because I didn’t want anybody to know… to know I was living in a tent.” Her voice trails off as if she were about to cry. “Because I was afraid that people were going to make fun of me,” she continues, hesitantly. “Because they would probably say ‘you are a hobo’,” she says, “and stuff like that.”

Kylee, 9 at the time, had to finish the school year without her eyeglasses. She had put them on the car’s hood one day and her father drove away, smashing them.

Seeing what the teacher wrote on the board was a challenge. “I had to sit up front or someone gave me it and I wrote it down or, sometimes, I looked cross-eyed,” Kylee said.

It would be several weeks before she got new glasses with help from a Charlestown food pantry.

CHRONIC TARDINESS and absences during their period of upheaval landed the family in Truancy Court last fall, at the start of the 2008-09 school year. A magistrate ordered the girls’ attendance and academic performance to be monitored.

“One of the things that we deal with here is parents trying to keep their jobs but also trying to get their children to school,” says Kevin Richard, state administrator for the Truancy Court. Richard often gets phone calls from anguished parents. “You can hear the stress in their voices.”

“Parents are quite taxed and trying to be in two places at once,” he said. “So, do they go to work late or do they make sure that [the children] get to school and risk being late for work?”

Last July, the Jordans, a federal stimulus check in hand, moved into their new apartment.

They have settled in, adding two pets, a cat and a rabbit, to their menagerie.

Reminders of their homeless days are gone. But so is Harry’s job. He was laid off Feb. 20, and the family is now living on his severance pay and unemployment benefits. “Everything is working out,” Karen says. Except for the lingering issue of truancy.

At a Truancy Court hearing June 12, school officials reported that Kylee, a fifth-grader, has been absent 16 days, and Lindsey, a third grader, has missed 7 days this school year. “Some excused, some unexcused,” their mother said after what turned out to be a heated court hearing.

“I worked hard to meet their requirements,” Karen said of the magistrate’s directives. “I was on them [Kylee and Lindsey] all the time.”

Karen Jordan later called Kylee’s guidance counselor, Alexander Macleod, to apologize for expressing anger at the hearing.

“I’m sorry. I have so much going on, and we still have to deal with this,” she tells Macleod. “It just seems like the more I try, the more I’m getting kicked back down.”

The Jordans have to report back to Truancy Court in September.

“And this is for something that happened last year,” Karen Jordan says, irritated and deflated.

marmenta@projo.com