But it's not enough for a garage sale

I am probably the Mrs. Kravitz (of the original Bewitched TV sitcom fame) of the Kal Haven Outpost campground.

Our home is parked next to the main entrance of the campground so I often sit in the “living room” and watch the comings and goings of fellow campers.

Last night a huge fifth-wheel trailer pulled in. I watched as first the truck appeared in my view and then the trailer, and the trailer and the trailer. Today, I can lean back and look out the window and watch as they continue to set up their camp.  The trailer was a “toy hauler” and this morning they backed a gator/golf cart thing out of the back end. The ramp then becomes a sort of outdoor seating area. They also set up a free-standing canopy. It’s a nice setup.

Before the pandemic shut things down last winter, King, our daughter and I took an afternoon and looked at new travel trailers. I have to confess we didn’t bother looking at the bigger models or the fifth wheels. It wasn’t so much the price tags as it was the length. Neither one of us has a desire to pull (and park) anything longer than 20 feet. That pretty much puts us in what manufacturers label as the “Weekender” category.  Evidently they don’t think one can live full-time in small spaces.  It takes some compromise,  but it is doable.

We are enjoying our life in our “weekender” and we continue to work to make our tiny house a home.

Last week King and I traveled to Grand Haven to help our son finish painting and putting up trim on his house. Well, King helped. I played with the grandkids. It gave us the opportunity to go through the nine remaining boxes of stuff we have stored in our son’s tool shed. I came home with a 1945 edition of the Joy of Cooking (which was a wedding gift to my mother), a few prints my mother had in her home, the Bible that was given to me when I joined Haven Reformed Church as a teen, and a couple of trivets.  

There are still a few boxes remaining that contain small appliances. They are doing little more than gathering dirt and mold. I thought I might save their content for the day we need to move into an apartment.  Now I am not so sure. I’m doing well with the set of cheap pots and pans, a single knife and plastic mixing bowls I use daily in the trailer.

So, I started eliminating even more “stuff” and gave a juicer and the picnic basked it had been stored in to our daughter-in-law.  I have a food dehydrator that I will give to the first daughter or daughter-in-law who says she wants it. I have bread pans and a few other things that can go to Goodwill.

Those treasures we decided to keep we brought home and spent a day or two looking for places to display them.  We live in 160 square feet. There is not a lot of wall space.

Our eclectic home has now become even more so. It’s become the Brady Bunch 1970s kitchen meets a 1980s rust and orange dining room meets my mother’s Early American décor.  The trailer now has a few sentimental things that will only mean something to me. The Early American prints were a gift from me to Mom when said she wanted something for above their bed.  There are two trivets in the kitchen. One was a gift to Mom when the church’s Women’s Guild group had a Secret Santa gift exchange in 1965. (There is a date and name on it). The other trivet I bought for her in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg, Russia) when I was an exchange student to Finland in 1973. There is also a glass vase my Finnish family gave my mother that same summer.  The cookbook is tucked away with a homemade Glenn United Methodist Church cookbook that has a few recipes from Mom in it.

Seven sentimental items and a sewing machine – that’s not so hard for kids to get rid of when King and I are gone, right?

Although it’s not much of a garage sale, is it.

We truly are worlds apart

It’s Sunday morning and the campground is a beehive of activity. People are sitting around their campfires for one last cup of coffee, joggers are getting one last run in before packing up and leaving and those wanting to get an early start are starting to unhook their trailers and RV’s or take down their tents.  By this afternoon there will be about eight of us left in the campground for the week. Summers are busy, but by the time we leave for the winter we will be the only trailer here.

I’ve been watching the young people across the drive from us. A group of eight friends (I assume they are friends) in their mid-to-late 20s spent the weekend camping. They have been a quiet group, spending most of the time sitting around the campfire, playing football and generally just chilling. There are two dogs with them – a golden retriever and a black lab. The lab must be older as he’s pretty sedate and goes with the flow. The Golden… is much younger and is quite insistent that everyone must love him for obvious reasons. They are well-behaved dogs. I got barked at when I came around the corner of our trailer with a huge hanging flower basket in my arms. It scared the poor lab to death to see a walking flower basket. He barked. Once.

Cindy could care less that there are other dogs around. She spends her days either sleeping in our bed or sleeping in the shade of the side of the trailer that faces the road. There is soft dirt there and she digs it up slightly for the coolness of the dirt under the surface.  I’m not certain she even notices the people across the drive, or if she can see that far. She definitely can’t hear them.  She is at the stage in her life where naps are frequent. She stretches out and almost immediately starts snoring.  Sometimes standing directly over her and calling her name is not enough to wake her and I have to physically touch her. I think it scares me as much as it does her.  Even my sweet Cindy could wake up snapping if startled. She never has… but the possibility is always there. I’m always cognoscente of that fact. I practice touch and jump back.

King and I normally park our home in more remote locations and often find our nearest neighbor to be a quarter-mile or further away.  This campground is very nice, clean and modern. But it reminds me of our early marriage years when we lived in married student housing. That’s ok. A bit of nostalgia is good for the soul. In our early days together I was the more gregarious one. I spent a lot of time outside with the other mothers watching our children and talking about classes. King only ventured out when there was a pickup basketball game.

I’m not so gregarious anymore. I prefer isolation. I could say it’s the pandemic, but I honestly think things would be the same with or without social distancing.  People wear me out.

Something happened this week that has me scratching my head and saying to myself, “Really, Phyllis?”

We got satellite TV.

For the first time in 43 years I can honestly say I am really excited about having almost unlimited TV channels. I think it is a further excuse to stay away from people.  A complete satellite system was among the things given to us by our friend two weeks ago.  It only took our son (a former cable installer) and 50 calls to the service to get it working. I guess I REALLY missed cable news shows. I didn’t realize it until I spent that first morning with satellite binge watching news shows. And yes… they are news SHOWS. Please people. Learn the difference between news reporting and opinion giving. That said, I do enjoy watching them.  Except for one news network, but since I neither endorse nor pan anything in my blog, that show shall remain nameless.

But I don’t watch news 24/7. And King likes his sitcom re-runs (before we got satellite I bought him the first five seasons of Andy Griffith on DVD and he now has the shows memorized). 

The other night, however, I fell asleep while reading and woke to King swearing at the TV. I listened for a while and realized he was swearing at a news show host.  “He’s just giving his opinion. He’s entitled,” I told him.

“Not when his opinion is wrong.”

“Ok then. I have a nice teen paranormal romance here. Why don’t you take a break and learn about werewolves and Dijons?”

We are worlds apart.