I Am Horny, Page 6

Bob’s teeth sparkle! He’s laying on the charm! And naturally he lives in a trailer.

A little backstory on what it meant to live in a trailer when I was growing up in rural Virginia. If you lived in a house on land you owned, you were considered well-off, even if you were dirt poor (this was the case for my mother and I, who owned our home and land but had very little income some years). If you lived in a trailer on land you owned, you were “on your way.” Trailers don’t have the same stigma in poor communities as they do in well-to-do ones.

On the lower end of the scale you had people who rented houses or trailers or set them up on land their family owned.  The latter was most common in our generally economically depressed location. Trailer parks were for people who truly had no family to rely on, either financially or socially, and rental properties were generally reserved for transients or “transplants” from outside the community who still associated a stigma with trailers and could afford to pay extra.

Buying a trailer or “modular home” is cheaper than building or buying a new house, and at least in the mountains there is no threat of hurricane or tornado to discourage setting them up. However, they have terrible re-sale value, so if you didn’t own the land under the trailer, you’d end up worse off than your landed countrymen in the long run.

I never heard the phrase “trailer trash” used in my community growing up, probably because most everyone lived in a trailer or had close family that did, and there weren’t enough well-to-do people to form a community wherein such a phrase would be permissible.

In contrast, before we transplanted to rural Virginia, I came from a community where trailers were reserved for only the lowest of the low tiers of the community. In fact, I don’t think I ever knew anyone who lived in a trailer. They were uncommon, and I never formed a strong opinion of them aside from that they made great places to stay on vacation at swamps and the coast.

I think Bob is a trailer-renter as opposed to a land-owner. But he owns his secondhand truck, I’m sure.