Three bike rides around the loops and I had the map memorized.
Trailer parks were child-sized. The low white fences and small 

lawns full of child joys: a whirligig, a pinwheel, a bright flag. Find
the cat! Frozen in the window, lolling on the railing, skittering

under the porch. In my childhood, my parents were always on the 
move from one chaos to the next: tee pee, tree house, houseboat, 

fishing boat. Trailers were too ordinary for my father, tasteless
for my mother. But I liked them. Small as a child’s clubhouse

or a railroad car settled down for the night. Built-in shelves to store 
your clothes so they were not always falling out of suitcases. Rain 

on the roof, loud as a tin shed, but inside dry. Not like my parent’s 
places, which often leaked. Time moved slowly there. Old women

with big buttons on their cardigans spent half a day watering 
their gardens in slow motion or dusting plastic daisies. Even then, 

I knew they didn’t own the land beneath them, but that seemed 
as it should be—for who can own the earth? And how lovely to haul 

your home with you, although as far as I could tell, no one ever did. 
In third grade, my class built a town from milk cartons. The houses 

and school and fire station all stayed obediently where we’d left them. 
We, gods over them all. Trailer parks were like that. Small enough 

to see the shape, the patterns. Too small for secrets. Now my parents 
have moved that final move, taking their chaos with them. The city 

where I live is fast, polished like a gem, but nestled here and there, 
a trailer park of battered tin: at the intersection of two highways, hidden 

between business parks, tucked behind the Jamba Juice and the gas 
station. I like them still. To me, they are neither a sadness nor a joke.

Here’s the one I love the most (perhaps I’ll find myself there in my 
old age, silent, wind in my hair) on the road from my city to the coast, 
a view of the gray Pacific, circled by goats and a field of artichokes.

Tarn Wilson is the author of the memoir The Slow Farm, the memoir-in-essays In Praise of Inadequate Gifts (winner of the Wandering Aengus Book Award), and a craft book 5-Minute Daily Writing Prompts. She is currently taking a break from her long-term relationship with prose and has been shamelessly flirting with poetry.