The back window was actually a sliding glass door. It had stacks of paper all the way across the bottom that were as tall as my chin when I looked out. The curtains were a old brown color that reminded me of mom and dad’s linoleum floor back home. I could part the curtains and look out into a cement back yard with a strip of ground that was an amazing green color. All the grass in that strip was the same height, and a lush texture that didn’t look at all like the ground around mom and dad’s trailer.

The ground around the trailer was brown, mostly. Small single plants here and there poked up out of the dirt here and there, looking like grasping hands to me. I didn’t like the yard, and stayed inside when I could. Mom and dad would make me go outside when they want quiet time. Everything around the trailer, and the other broken down trailers made me think of animals crawling off to die. Which is what trailer parks remind me of whenever I drive by one. They’re not dead ends for broken dreams, there are many families that do well. It’s my own memories that create the image that I see whenever I pass by one.

The trailer park we lived in, the ‘Western Spur’, was truly the last refuge of broken dreams and wasted lives. I didn’t like it, but children can adapt, and I was able to make some friends, or make up others when the few other kids like me weren’t around. Being the youngest meant that I was always the last one to be able to do anything if I was in a group. That was, I think, what made me value time alone. I didn’t have to wait, and I didn’t have to do what the bigger kids wanted to.

I could go at my own pace, explore what interested me, and not what someone else decided was the thing to go do. It was kind of how mom and dad were after the scary man came by. They quit seeing friends, except for Uncle Soap, and kept the curtains pulled so there wasn’t any way to look outside. They still put me out to play, but it wasn’t the same. Most of the other kids had moved away, or were now in school, so there was no one to play with and I wasn’t enrolled in kindergarten. So that meant I spent most of my home time alone outdoors.

My days were of being pushed outside when my parents woke up, being given money to go to the little general store at the entrance of the park, buy a snack for lunch, and then stay outside until the afternoon, when mom and dad let me back in to play in the house, eat dinner, watch TV, and then go to sleep to do it all over again the next day.

This went on, until the day that next spring. Mom and dad dropped me off at Uncle Soap’s. I don’t know if it’s me looking back and trying to put some prescient thought into that day in my mind, or I did actually pick up that my parents were more excited than usual for a camping weekend.