Last year, we attended the funeral for my husband’s father, Paul. While there, we were approached by a woman who used to date Paul. She was curious to learn some details about the family.
“Now, I understand,” she said, lowering her voice and glancing around furtively, “that one of Paul’s sons lives in a trailer.”
I couldn’t understand why she was now whispering. “That’s us,” I told her, my voice at normal volume. “We live in a trailer.”
She gasped and put her hand over her mouth.
The conversation took another weird turn from there, forcing me to exert all my powers of not bursting into laughter right in her face. The poor thing—so scandalized by the fact that yes, indeed, we live in a trailer. I don’t know if she was picturing a horse trailer (maybe our children peek out through the little slats in the back when they want some fresh air) or if she was picturing a trailer that you hook to the back of a truck and pull. Perhaps she would have been less appalled if she knew we have three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a laundry room, a built-in sprinkler, a garden tub—or maybe not. Maybe the word “trailer” was all that mattered.
As my husband and I talked about this, laughing until tears ran down our cheeks, we discussed our living arrangements. Yes, we’d like a larger home, but in the meantime, we have what we most need, and that’s love. I might not have all the cupboard space I want, but we enjoy being together. My little boys might be tired of sharing a room, but we have unity.
A home can be a mansion on a hill, it can be a 17 X 70 trailer home, like ours—heck, it could even be a horse trailer. It’s not the house itself that makes the home. We all know that. It’s the love the family shares that makes it a home, and if you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter where you live—you never will be happy. When you do have that, you can be happy anywhere.
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