As I travel over the Southeastern United States I have become increasingly aware of the number of mobile homes that will sprout up overnight, much like a crop of aluminum and rubber mushrooms. Statistics show that Florida as a state has more of the homes , and South Carolina has the second highest honor. All of this was a surprise to me as I felt Kentucky would rank as a top contender. If my memory serves me right we are number 8 on the list , but this writing makes no pretense to be anywhere near accurate. I do know that Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee have groups of Jugornauts who go out and place these tin creations in impossible to imagine locations. As a matter of fact one of the sales lots in Booneville, Kentucky is on such a mountain top that if you stepped out the back doors you would fall 80 or 90 feet straight down.People have bulldozers to push flat spots on the steep slopes and then--Voila! Instant home. Nowadays these things are very nice and are huge , especially the doublewides. I just can't warm up to the traps myself as I feel that they were invented for meteriologists to measure wind severity by.Watch the news after a series of tornadoes and where are all the newsteams broadcasting live from?Right where the Shady Grove trailer park used to be. As I grew up it became somewhat of a ritual of adulthood for my peers to have children, get married, and buy a mobile home as quickly as they could buy a lot to stand for a downpayment. I believe that the young man would wake up some morning with a pounding in his head and a voice screaming"MOBILE HOME !MOBILE HOME!". Only after he purchased the home would the pounding ease up. Just as the children would be entering the middle school would he wake up with an even worse splitting headache. This time the voice would be saying"DOUBLE WIDE! DOUBLE WIDE!" and the instant solution is obvious. Now I'm not too good to live in a mobile home; I'm just too scared. Have you ever met a trailer salesman?Well let me introduce him to you . He wears polyester pants held up with a leather belt that has a brass nameplate on it , most of the time his own. He never wears socks and plays a lot of bad golf. He has been known to drink a little too much , and his last two wives will tell you. He goes to Tennessee and the factory pretty regular and calls all women Darlin. He used to look like Conway Twitty but now he looks like Dale Senior.I used to love girls who lived in trailers because they just made me feel like they liked me. The same with preachers daughters and girls who drove pale yellow VW Beetles. All these things leave me with warm feelings inside. The only problem is that I have been hearing voices ,and having headaches. You know you can take a boy out of the country but you can't take the country out of the boy. I don't know how I'm going to break the news to Sandy. Maybe I'll start out with a little camper.
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