My people do write the quaintest titles though, don't we?

I live in a small but very affluent city. In fact the first remark people make when they find out where I live is a stunned "they have a trailer park there?" Indeed they do, as a secret shopper noted during the grand opening of a nearby housing development. "Yes," the sales representative conceded,"but don't worry. It's fenced in."

Well the joke's on her. We trailer parkians are a freakishly agile bunch. Comes from all that crawling around shooing skunks out from under the skirting. Plumbers appreciate it when you do that before calling them out. They didn't at one of the trailers my plumber got called out to. He was already underneath the thing working when he made that discovery, and in his haste to get away forgot that the pipe he'd been working on was pretty much exactly at mouth level in the direction he was turning at approximately five thousand miles per hour.

That was the last he saw of those teeth. But still, agile! I mean he did get away, after all. Well most of him did, anyway.

No, it's not a glamorous life. Glamorous people don't live in houses that tilt at odd angles after heavy rain falls. Glamorous people don't have leaky taps that they refuse to fix because it keeps the pipes from freezing when it's forty below, and glamorous people don't generally have small mammals denning under their front door. The few that do probably spend more on haircare for those mammals than I do on dental.

Trailer park people are well aware that we're the laughing stock of, well, everywhere. We're a stereotype, a catch phrase, and a hilarious party theme all rolled into one. Let's be frank, we're the only distinct demographic that it's still okay to make fun of. We're the lovable chumps of North American society. Not poor enough to be scary poor, just poor enough to be ridiculous. Not an economically important enough population to worry about alienating, and not a socially troubled enough population to worry about being sensitive to. We're not tragedy poor, we're comedy poor. We're Jerry Springer poor!

One thing we're not, though, is house poor. My home isn't as desirably located, attractively architectured, or even as sedentary as I might ideally prefer, but the most important thing it isn't is the bank's. For me there can be no home sweet home sweeter than a home I can truly call my own. Well, mine and the skunks' I suppose.