This house. I will never forget the first night my wife and I spent in this house. We were still newlyweds. We had just left our apartment. This place was our first real house. Ours. All ours.
We sat on a cold floor, watching a portable TV, we ate take-out Mexican food. We were on top of the world.
We've been gone a long time. I've missed it.
Some background information is in order here. A few years ago, we moved out of our place and started renting it out. We moved into a camper I bought off Craigslist.
I parked the trailer across the road, on our land, in a swamp. It was twenty-eight feet long and smelled like a pot of collards.
We left our house because we were traveling a lot, due to my accidental career as a storyteller—if that’s what you’d call me. We were never in town. Our house often sat vacant while we gallivanted through the Southeast. So we rented it out.
I don't
know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
But anyway, back to the camper. It’s funny how you end up living a life opposite from the the one you always dreamed of. Growing up, one of my main dreams was to not go to prison.
Living in a camper feels like doing hard time in San Quentin.
Our living room was about the size of a gas chamber. And it smelled like one, too. I'm not kidding. Several times, our dog Otis (alleged Labrador) would leap onto our counters looking for food. His paws would flip the gas knobs to the propane stove. Nobody would notice.
One night, the trailer filled with noxious fumes while we slept. Early the next morning, I was dizzy. I awoke to find the ghost of Dale Earnhardt nosing through my refrigerator.
Dale greeted me. “Sean, wake up or…