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Living in a Trailer House
by
Jo Ann Mann
(The Real Story)
The beautiful $45,000 trailer house was really a $19, 000 beauty and he had no trouble finding a place to put it! It was placed about 350ft away from his mother and daddy’s house. It was on their land, which was a working dairy farm. Now don’t get me wrong, I loved his mother and daddy with all my heart and soul and I never had a cross word with them. I had a hard time keeping up with my mother-in-law as she had the cleanest house, the prettiest yard and managed to kill her own chickens for lunch! Well, that is a completely different story! That story deserves a place all by itself.
Now back to the trailer house. It is very true that my sweet hubby had to do all the maintenance on this wonderful trailer, which by the way, was placed about 40ft from the bullpen. This is where (in full view of my three “innocent” children) all the natural acts of animals took place. My children had a ringside seat from the trailer! They then spread the word to all the other innocent children in pre-school and first grade! I had half the parents in our small town giving me dirty looks as I dropped my kids off for school.
Oh did I mention the flies and the smell? It was terrible to live in a trailer in the summer. It was so hot you had to open up the doors to stay cool. Naturally the flies thought they were welcomed into my beautiful trailer. Now I never minded flies when we lived in town because I didn’t know where the flies had been. I knew where “farm flies” had been and I sure as heck wasn’t going to eat anything that they landed on. One good thing about living in that trailer was that I was fifty pounds slimmer then! Never ate too much back then because the flies landed on everything that was on the table!
Now, let’s talk about the mice. Will get to the “snake” later. Mice love trailer houses. They bring their young into them at an alarming rate. The young in turn start having babies and pretty soon there is not a “sagging” kitchen drawer that doesn’t have a family of mice living in them. They just loved jumping out at me when I opened the drawers. It was useless to even try to take something out of the drawers because the mice had already eaten all the contents, digested them
and all that was left were the “droppings." Would rather call it another name other than “droppings," but I am trying to be nice. The children of course never wanted you to kill the “little bitty baby mice”. That too is another story!
Now we come to the storms! My dear husband (who moved me into that trailer) had to get up every morning at 3:00 a.m. to milk the cows! Yes, cows, a hundred and fifty of them to be exact! Each one of the cows had their own family of flies. Here I go again back to the flies; sorry I got sidetracked again!
The thunderstorms would always seem to roll in about midnight. As a mother, with three children and another on the way, I was the one who watched the sky. Never once slept through a thunderstorm in that beautiful trailer house. Have any of you ever tried to wake up your spouse who was dead tired from milking cows and plowing the fields all day? Well, it is near impossible.
The thunderstorm would rock that trailer back and forth, the hail sounded like baseballs hitting
the tin roof. Old “sleeping beauty” would not budge even for a crying hysterical wife screaming,
“We are all going to die and you don’t care!" The good Lord and I sure talked a lot during
thunderstorms. Getting closer to God was a plus while existing in that trailer. You see I have
changed “living” to “existing” now.
Okay now we come to the snake. Somehow the story got just a “tad” mixed up and my sweet
hubby said that it was “he” who had the encounter with the snake. The real story is that it was “I”
who found the snake in my bathroom! At that time, Jack (my husband’s real name) was building
us a new brick home as he was tired of listening to his nagging wife! Yes, I admit it, I nagged, I
begged, I pleaded, I promised the world to him if he would get me out of that trailer. He was down
at the new house putting shingles on the roof. (Shingles not made of tin) I was at the trailer taking
a nap (also very pregnant) and the other three children were in the living room watching cartoons.
I, being heavy with child, went into the bathroom and I am the one who found that snake! It
didn’t take me long to get up on the toilet and scream at the kids to go get the hoe because there
was a copperhead in my bathroom. They heard the word snake and they ran out the front door.
The snake started slithering out of the bathroom. I knew if I didn’t kill the sucker that I wouldn’t have a place to live for awhile because I sure wasn’t going to live there anymore. I jumped (heavy with child) over the snake and then started throwing anything I could find at it. The kids finally found the hoe and I chopped that sucker in about ten different pieces. Put what was left of the snake in the bed of my truck and took it to the new house to show my loving husband!
He climbed down the ladder to meet his crying pregnant wife with his three other children in tow. We showed him the snake and said we were moving in the new house. Well he tried to convince me that the chances of another snake in the trailer were one in ten million. That night I slept with the lights on in the trailer. After all, it was me that had to get up and go to the bathroom all night long since I was “heavy with child."
The next morning Jack was getting up at 3:00 a.m. and since the lights were on I woke up too. I saw him at the foot of the bed, he was looking into his boot really hard, and then he turned his boot over and gave it a good tap on the sole of his boot. I sat up in bed and said, “Yea, babe, one in ten million, right?”
His reply came, “No sense in taking any chances
honey”!
Now you have a “He says, She says,” story of what happened in that trailer. All the stories that
Jack Mann wrote in “Living in a Trailer” were true! The only thing he didn’t tell everyone was
that I was the one who encountered that “Stinky Snake." This is the end to the story and I got in
the last word!
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