There's trailer living, then there's the Pink Pagoda. A Midwest summer in a single-wide.
There's trailer living, then there's the Pink Pagoda. A Midwest summer in a single-wide.
The Pink Pagoda
I’ve lived in the same house for thirty-five years now. That’s a long time to live in one place, especially when you consider that the average American family moves every five years.
The first time we saw this house for sale I knew it was home. Or, as the pet adoption agencies say: it was to be our forever home. The feeling was reinforced when we walked through. Although it was built in 1914, we are just the third family to own it. I don’t know if the house attracts stable people or if stable people choose the house.
God knows I sure wasn’t stable when I got here. I’d averaged a year and a half in any given school during my grade school and high school years and graduated from college with credits from six different institutions, so the first half of my life was at best peripatetic.
When you fill out an application for a security clearance you must list everywhere you’ve lived for what seems like the last hundred years. I’m sure it’s not that long, but it’s at least ten years. Although that’s no longer a challenge for me, it certainly was the first few times I filled one out.
As a military servicemember you’re required to have a security clearance and the higher you go or the more sensitive position you hold requires a higher level of security clearance, by the time I retired from the Army National Guard, I held what’s known as a TS-SCI, which means, as we used to say in the military, “If I told you anything, I’d have to kill you and cut your head off…” Yeah, I know, not funny, but that’s a soldier’s sense of humor.
At any rate, I’m not here to talk about security clearances or the occasionally, macabre sense of military humor. This is about places I’ve lived. Now you need to know that we happen to also own a single-wide one-bedroom 1967 model trailer…or its more genteel name, a mobile home.
Mobile homes have long been denigrated as cheap housing for working class folks. People a rung or two up the socio-economic ladder sneeringly refer to the occupants of the aluminum-clad, factory-built residences as “trailer trash”. We, who live in the Midwest, refer to them as “tornado magnets” because the evening news, during tornado season, invariably displays video clips of destroyed trailer parks, filled with scattered possessions and weeping residents.
Our trailer is perched on a Southern Illinois Mississippi River bluff side overlooking the Missouri bottom lands with the foothills of the Ozark Mountains on the horizon. We acquired the single-wide almost by accident, as it came as a package deal with the cottage overlooking the Mississippi River, we bought a few years ago. It serves nicely as a “crash pad” for our younger son or the occasional visitor who wants more privacy than our guest bedroom.
Then, of course, there was the trailer my dad lived in, perched on a hill overlooking a pond in Cumberland County, Illinois, just north of Greenup and south of Hurricane Creek. No running water and the power was turned off more than it was on, because the bill wasn’t paid.
So yeah, I’ve got some experience with trailer living.
It ain’t all bad. Sure, the pipes freeze in the winter, if you live up north. And they’re hard to cool in the summer when the sun beats down on the metal, but hey, it’s a place to call home. And beats the hell out of city life.
Then there was the Pink Pagoda. The Pink Pagoda, as I recall, was a 1957 model, two-bedroom trailer. It sat on a skirted foundation, next to a group home for mentally disabled people at the edge of a small Southern Illinois town forty-five minutes from St. Louis.
The Pink Pagoda’s name derived from its faded pink hue. The trailer’s exterior bleached from decades of Southern Illinois sun beating down on it. It served as my summer residence after my second year of law school. The location was convenient for my unpaid, day-time internship in the prosecuting attorney’s office, while the reverse commute into St. Louis for my night-time janitor job downtown wasn’t too bad.
There wasn’t much furniture, but my stereo fit in the living room and there was room on the concrete slab patio outside for a charcoal grill to burn hamburgers on for the weekend beer blasts that law students favor. And I knew I’d only be there for a summer, not for a lifetime. Most importantly, the rent fit my impoverished, law student budget. Although the GI bill picked up my living expenses during the school year, there was no government stipend during the summer, so the just-over-minimum-wage janitorship cleaning toilets and emptying trash cans had to cover summer expenses.
The landlord assured me the trailer had been thoroughly cleaned after the last tenant moved out. I don’t recall whether the last tenant had died or had moved to a nursing home, but she had lived there for twenty years or so. She and her seven cats that is.
Yep, I was following the “crazy old cat lady” in my tenancy. As for thoroughly cleaning, they’d vacuumed the carpet, mopped the kitchen floor and called it a day.
Do you have any idea how much cat hair is left in a twelve foot by forty foot, sunbaked tin can after two decades? You could have knitted enough afghans for twenty invalids from the hair clinging to the curtains.
Did I mention I have a mild allergy to cats?
The glass-slatted windows, that provided little protection during the winter, were cranked open to the widest aperture possible. Every one of those windows in the Pink Pagoda stayed that way through that summer’s Midwest thunderstorms, nighty-eight-degree days and muggy nights with bloodthirsty mosquitoes pinging off the screens. The twelve-dollar box fan from Kmart sucking in just enough air to keep the cat dander from choking me.
As for our single-wide, single bedroom on the bluff? Last week, the mailman and his wife wanted to rent it, but they have a cat.
© William L. Enyart