There is this commercial on TV now… I think it’s for a discount department store? It features a group of people drinking wine, eating hors d’oeuvres, laughing and chatting in their cocktail-party clothes, while candles on the table gently illuminate the fancy place settings.
And every time I see it, I think, “I WANT TO BE AT THAT PARTY! It looks like fun and it doesn’t even involve objects that must be thrown, driven really fast, or smashed into each other.”
Don’t get me wrong: redneck stuff is fun. Well, the redneck stuff that I’ve done anyway. Which is actually pretty mild as far as redneck goes. I mean, NASCAR and country music and beer does not a redneck make. You need to add a few things, like a mullet haircut and a t-shirt with the arms cut off, and subtract a few things, like, um, teeth, and then you get a redneck.
But I did live in a 38-foot fifth wheel for almost two years.
Let me repeat that. I LIVED in a TRAILER for almost two YEARS.
You know that old saying, “You can live in your car, but you can’t drive your house?” Nuh-uh. I could live in my house and drive my house.
My husband did some fancy number-crunching with the budget and all the money we’d save, and how we’d be spending our living allowance on something we would eventually own instead of throwing it away on rent, blah blah blah. I agreed to 8 months.
1 YEAR and 8 months later, we finally retired the fifth wheel and moved into a rented house with some roommates. I prefer to think of the fifth-wheel time as the “marriage test.” Because if two people can live together in a trailer with a dog and a cat, and then get up and go to work every day (at the same place) where our offices are so close they literally share a wall, and the husband can learn to deal with a closet allotment the size of a toaster (because, let’s face it, the closet wasn’t big to begin with) and the wife learns to deal with banged shins (because, let’s face it, she’s not graceful in normal-sized rooms), and these two people don’t kill each other? Ah, marital bliss.
