Trailer Trash

The first year or so that my family lived in Az, we lived in a house but eventually we moved into a double-wide trailer in a mobile home park near Kyrene and Baseline in Tempe, Az. This is where I lived for about eight years until we moved to a rental house in Mesa when I was about 14 years old.

These were some of the poorest years of our lives. My mom was a great cook and she did well for as little as we had. For years, we used powered milk. Hated it. We almost never had sugared cereal except for the occasional Fruit Loops. We had stuff like puffed wheat, shredded wheat, and corn flakes. We had a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches, soup, omelets, and other cheap meals. My mom made the best liver and onions, goulash, casseroles, and her own cactus jelly.

This was the place I tried to ride my uncle’s bike that was a little too big for me and fell into the saguaro cactus in our front yard. That was painful and it was about a month before all the needles were out of the back of my leg.

The mobile home park had a couple pools, a club house, and a baseball diamond. We used to ride our bikes around the neighborhood but we had to be close enough to hear my mom’s whistle, which was pretty loud. 

This is the place where I broke my front tooth on the concrete in front of the clubhouse while sliding on my feet through water puddles. I’ve had a crown on my front tooth ever since.

I used to go around the neighborhood mowing lawns for money. We were not allowed to go around the neighborhood for Halloween except to our next door neighbors.

We grew up with swamp cooling, NOT air conditioning. You can only imagine how warm it was inside during the summertime but that is the way it was and we managed.

We were latchkey kids before someone coined the term. We spent the summer inside while our parents went to work because we weren’t allowed to go outside to play when they were gone. We had chores to do. We watched TV and played Monopoly, Pay Day, and other games way too many times. My sisters, to this day, won’t play Monopoly with me. Apparently, I have lucky dice.

This is the place where my dad refused to change from natural gas to propane gas and so we went without hot water and an oven for about two years. We used to boil our water for our baths and/or take sponge baths.

I don’t remember thinking life was bad. It’s just the way it was.