This is from 14 August 1999. My dad was still alive. (He died 28 July 2001.)

I grew up in a trailer park. I didn’t mind because I had some advantages people with houses and yards didn’t have, mainly because of where our particular trailer was situated, at the corner of a woods and a field.

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Amsdell Road
woods
woods | field
woods | trailer 56
woods | trailer
woods | trailer
woods | trailer
woods | trailer
woods | trailer
woods | trailer
clearing with circular track behind tree line |______________ | grassy area and ditch
Route 20

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When my parents moved to the trailer park, they had a smaller trailer in a different location, but my arrival necessitated a larger trailer in a different spot (already, I was powerful). 🙂 They ended up on the end of the row, with woods behind them and field next to them.

The woods hadn’t always been woods; I have a postcard from the 1950s that shows the park from an aerial perspective, and it was just a few scattered shrubs that must have sprouted — pretty bare and desolate looking, especially in black and white. The man who owned the land was always trying to sell it with no luck; the woods probably grew up on their own since activity wasn’t stopping them. By the last time I’d seen them, in 1987, they were close to maturing into a real forest (a tiny one). The trees were finally getting tall and the underbrush that is typical of young, developing woods was starting to clear out a little. A lesson in ecology — the stages of a forest.

My father planted a row of lilac bushes along the property line between the trailer and the woods. He was always disappointed that they never bloomed. Too shady, perhaps?

He put up several bird feeders behind the trailer, so you could see them from my parents’ bedroom window. We had every kind of bird, from titmice, nuthatches, chickadees, and cardinals to woodpeckers. I could hear whippoorwills every now and then at night (although, to this day, I’ve never seen one). He says he saw a great horned owl on the light pole behind the trailer once. Occasionally, we saw deer stroll out past his garden or poking their noses out from the underbrush. And rabbits. It was always a thrill to see a rabbit. It was a long time before I saw rabbits in Chicago.

In the field there were a couple of areas that had been dug out and were swampy. My father is a strange man in some ways. (I of course do not take after him in this respect. 🙂 He used to look around for what he could find, and one day he found a wild rosebush growing in one of these areas. He dug it up and tied it to a trellis. In June, I’d go out early in the morning and smell them, and take one or two for a little glass on my dresser.

I used to go out into the field or into clearings at the edge of the woods and picnic or read or play. Alone. I wasn’t supposed to go into the woods — the man who owned them didn’t want kids in there — and my parents were afraid I’d get into trouble, but eventually he told my dad once I was a good kid and he didn’t mind me. I still didn’t, because I was slightly afraid of who was hanging out in there (kids drinking, plus the owner’s daughter rode through on her horse with her dog, and the dog — a German shepherd — was pretty territorial). And, there was at one point a man who used to follow me when I was 14 or so, and I really didn’t want him to get me alone. Every now and then I’d try to explore, but I’d come to the boundaries too soon, or I would get disoriented about how far I’d gone and where I was.

My dad left the trailer park in 1987, to move to Pennsylvania to be nearer family since he was starting to have a series of heart attacks and strokes. Before he left, it was sold by the man who had owned it ever since I could remember and whom I had always thought of as middle-aged, but of course he, like my dad, had grown old. The new owner decided that the field was going to waste, so he put in plumbing, wiring, and more trailers. It was not the same. I saw it only once, when there weren’t that many trailers, but it was a sad thing, like losing a part of myself or what makes me myself.

I haven’t been back there since my dad left. A friend emailed me and told me that part of the woods on the corner had been cleared for a funeral home with parking lot. I have no idea how big it may be or how far it may extend, but I wondered if now, if you looked out our back window, you’d see a parking lot and a funeral home . . . I try not to let this bother me. It is all out of my hands, and the world goes on with or without me. And it’s the memories that count. Although losing greenwood to a funeral home seems cruel . . .

I have had recurring dreams about being in woods that go on forever, or open onto breathtaking vistas where I could live forever. They hurt. It’s like something that is so beautiful, so desirable that it causes pain.

One dream was a little different. I found the funeral home in the middle of a deep forest (not on a corner) and, although there were windows, it felt deserted, but it also felt like I was being watched. I wanted in for some reason — maybe just to see if it was real. It was white and blocky looking, more like a factory/warehouse building. I thought it was really a crematory. It was very out of place in both appearance and in feeling. It was a little like the impression left by a movie like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge. The pace is off, the lighting is off, the whole feel is off somehow. It’s not real. Even in the context of a dream, it didn’t feel real.

Today, I dreamed that I did go back. Some of the details are fuzzy now, but the trailers in the field were gone, and the funeral home was irrelevant. The woods were like the woods of my other dreams — infinite, lush, mature, with hills, valleys, and streams — everything I could want. In my dream I somehow began to think that this is the way they always were and I didn’t know because the bad things (the funeral home, the trailers) hadn’t been there to reveal what was really there. Not very logical, necessarily, but in a strange way . . .

What was strangest of all was the view out the living room and kitchen windows, where the field had been, where the trailers had been, and where, going west, had been a line of trees before a lot and then the highway — where the evening star would rise, where my parents had once seen the aurora borealis. All over was now shining waters, and in the middle, a bridge — a bridge that connected to something at right angles at the further end, but to nothing — not even land — at the closer end. It was a huge, enclosed, iron bridge like I think I’ve seen in Buffalo, but somehow beautiful despite being industrial in design.

My vantage point was on an elevation looking over all this, as though I was no longer quite where I had been. And the geography had changed a little, too, because the water was where that treeline had been, and that didn’t seem to make sense to me. It made sense that here was a giant lake or ocean, but not that it expanded in that direction. Why had we never seen it before? Did someone remove the treeline and there it was all along? But how did it end up being where the field had been, too?

It was surreal and gorgeous. And disorienting.

I woke up. That was disorienting, too . . .