My childhood was charmed. The first eleven years of it were especially wonderful when we lived in Village Green. Village green is the name of the trailer park we lived in. It was all so much like a dream. Or a reality TV show. Maybe some of each. But I loved it.
I recently decided to look up our trailer park on Google Earth. Okay, that feels weird. We never called it the trailer park, we called it the trailer court, so let's just get that out in the open so I can stop trying to remember to keep from typing what is actually coming out of my brain after long years of usage (i.e. trailer court) and translating it into the-rest-of-the-world-ese.
So Village Green was the trailer court (sounds so much more regal and so much less "white trash"*) in which I grew up. And I decided to find it on Google Earth.
I entered the address: 222 N. 1200 W., Orem, UT, and here is where it took me:
I stared and stared at the area directly above where the address is written and couldn't for the LIFE of me make sense of trying to wander through those streets. Wait. Where is the park? Where are half the streets? And what, pray tell, is that huge parking lot to the left of it? I don't remember any business in the area large enough to require such a huge parking lot.
I seriously looked up and down the street and zoomed way out and back in again. I made sure I was looking in the right area compared to Trafalga Family Fun Center, which was just down the street. Yes. this was the place. What in the world happened? Where was the place I had grown up?
Then, after turning the map and thinking and thinking for far more minutes than I care to admit, I took a closer look at the parking lot.
Yeah. Duh. Not duh ME, of course! Duh, Google Earth, who wrote my address out under the adjacent neighborhood. How was I to know that the parking lot, which happened to be located exactly where I remembered the trailer court being, actually WAS the trailer court when the address was written so far off? Sheesh.
Once I got over that (I feel like an idiot again just thinking about it), I starting wandering in my mind through that trailer court. And it was all there. All the places I rode my bike and the hill on which I'd wiped out on my roller skates countless times. My best freind's house and the park. Oh, but the pool. Looks like the swimming pool is gone. Other than that, it looked like home. And then I found home.
In the lower left hand corner, with a brown roof, was the double-wide I grew up in. The one that started out as a single-wide and, as our family grew, was transformed into a double-wide by my dad, who can do anything.
Oh the memories! Thousands of them flying at me in the most random of orders. And so I realized that I need to put them down. And so I'm going to.
This is the first of a series I will be doing about life in the trailer court. I can't wait to get it all out.
*For the record, I really hate the term "white trash", especially when used to describe a person for the same reason I despise the term "loser".
