Home Sweet Home

     From the road my neighborhood  does not look like much.  It's much more akin to a relic of the past than the manicured lawns of today's modern neighborhoods.  A community it is, living and breathing as though it was 1960.  The only thing missing is Free Love, Flower Power and a joint of marijuana in every one's pocket.  OK, I know not everyone experienced the 60' and 70's the way I did but you can rest assured my pockets were full, I knew how to plant flowers and during the 60's and 70's I learned the meaning of free love while between the bed sheets.
     Fifty years ago everyone knew everyone else in  neighborhood USA.  Not only did you know the family's name, you knew all the family members names and all their pets names.  You knew where they worked and when each neighbor left and arrived from work.  Most families  only owned one automobile, making it easy to keep up with the any of your neighbors simply  by the sound of their car.  What an age of innocents it was back then.  The term "Keeping up with the Joneses" wasn't in anyone vocabulary.
     Today is very different.  Most neighborhoods have Joneses living side by side and rarely do they know the names of the neighborhood pets much less  able to distinguish  the sound of one auto from another.  But if one gets away from today's modern neighborhoods, that age of innocents still exist in out of the way RV Parks like the one I live in.  Yes I hear the term "Trailer Trash" every once in a while and I imagine it's been used to describe me a few times but everyone who lives in my neighborhood is as good of a neighbor as one could every ask for.  No one cares what anyone else does and the closest  so called Jones family lives 30 miles away.
     This lifestyle is not for most people but once you live it you never want to live any other way.  This lifestyle cost 10% of what owning a house in a normal neighborhood cost and the maintenance cost is almost nonexistence.  When a RV wears out you just roll it out and roll in a new one in a matter of ten minutes. You don't have to work sixteen hours days  to pay for that roof over your head or be  be struck with fear from  a thirty year mortgage.
      Most people will never understand why anyone would live in a RV that never leaves a neighborhood.  They don't understand why you don't want a conventional  house in a conventional neighborhood.  When someone learns of such a lifestyle they all ask the question "where do you put all your stuff' and how do you stand living so close to each other"?.  I tell them of a time when I moved from one city to another with all my worldly possessions packed into a 1965 VW automobile.  I guess you could say I'm not much of a stuff kind of guy and that I learned the meaning of close back in the 70's when all those joints were being passed around.   I know it will never be 1960 again but this is about as close as it's ever going to get.