...and they all fall down

I don't know why whenever I tell people that I lived in a trailer growing up, I feel as if I should defend myself and my family. It's kind of like an assumption that if you lived in a trailer your family is poor.

Actually, that's why I hate telling people that I grew up living in a trailer because it usually goes something like this -

Me - Yeah, I lived for a long time in a trailer..

Person - Oh...

Me - BUT ITS NOT THAT WE WERE POOR...it was easier on my mom to get around

Person - that's cool, my uncle lives in a..

Me - YEAH..just don't want you to think that my family is a bunch of rednecks or anything..ha..ha...ha...

then things just awkwardly go back to whatever it was we were talking about prior to my outburst and raise in volume.

Truth is, it was easy to blame the fact that we lived in a trailer on the fact that my mother is in a wheelchair and it was in fact easier on her to get around. However, now that i'm an adult, it's time to face facts and realize that we were kind of poor.

Anyways, I'm rambling on about this because a lot of my stories from my childhood are going to revolve around something that happened in a trailer park, mostly due to the fact that my childhood was spent in a trailer park (or 3, don't judge us).

I didn't want to just jump into the story and be all like, "once upon a time in the trailer park" and people get all judgmental on me.

*I want to add in that while writing this blog, I grew a bit distracted and went all ADD on myself and decided that cleaning my room needed to be done RIGHT NOW, so I stopped writing and cleaned...now I'm back to finish*

I don't remember exactly how old I was when this particular story happened, I want to say that I was 16 (so we'll just go with that) so that would make this take place just a few days before Christmas of 2000. I was sitting on my couch doing whatever super cool, super hip 16 year olds do, which was more then likely watching MTV while arguing with my sister to let me use the internet before the dial up connection cut out.

I got a call from my friend, Jennifer. She lived in a trailer up the hill from mine and was trying to get a hold of the woman that lived right behind me. The people that lived right behind me were nasty rednecks (you can judge them) but for some reason I was friends with them.

Anyways, the reason why Jennifer wanted to get in touch with the other lady, Charlotte, was because she thought that she had left on her iron that morning and Charlotte had a key to get into Jenn's house. However, Charlotte didn't have a phone and that's why I was brought into the mix.

As I walk out my door to go up and relay the message to Charlotte, I see that she is driving down the road about to pass my house.

At that moment, I don't know what happened, but I decided that the message that I had to give to her was the most important thing in the world and it was my mission in life to get it to her at no matter the cost.

I took off down our ramp (mom + wheelchair + stairs = no good...thus we had a ramp) and hit our driveway going full force and as fast as my chubby legs would pump.

Now, seeing as this happened nearly 10 years ago, I don't remember why I felt this message was best to be served without me putting shoes on, but I left the house with no shoes...I wasn't a bright teenager. My driveway was also just this gravel hill and it was fairly steep.

To this day, I'm not really sure how it happened but this is what I remember - Me pumping down the driveway waving for Charlotte to stop, then slipping on something, and then laying at the bottom of my driveway next to her car bleeding on myself.

It went something like this -




It all happened so quickly and once I had started my barrel roll of death, there was no backing out. Once I looked up, Charlotte was just sitting there staring at me as if she had just seen a 3 car pile up right in front of her. She asked me if I was OK, I told her the message, and then I walked back up the driveway to lick my wounds and scrape my dignity off of the gravel.

I had gravel embedded in both knees and feet that had to be fished out with a pair of tweezers.


The worst part of it all, the iron wasn't even left on.