Trailer Trash Mama (Again!)

Remember in the olden days when hooking up was a benign expression you used to arrange a meeting with a friend?  To see a movie or have lunch?  Before the term caused your teenager to hiss at you, with much dramatic eye rolling, “You can’t say that anymore!”  Because when you weren’t looking the term had changed to mean a sexual encounter of a temporary, no strings attached nature.  What we used to call a one night stand.  Not that I ever had any of those of course.   Imagine the eye strain if they heard me talking about the various kinds of hookups I’m involved in these days.  A Full Hookup is prized, a Partial is okay as long as I get a Full one in a couple of days, and a Dry one can be tolerated as long as our Jenny is allowed.  And it’s not too hot.  Or cold.  Or in a Walmart parking lot. Let me explain.   A Full Hookup is when you get to plug in to Water, Sewer and Electric and you can run the washer and dryer at the same time ...

Actually, it should be spelled Suwannee, and the title of Stephen Foster’s most famous song is actually Old Folks At Home.  Just a couple of the corrections I had to make to my mental record after our stay at the Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park on the banks of that river.  A grand title for a small but very nice State Park in the tiny hamlet of White Springs, in northern Florida.  Finding a spot at any State park in Florida in February is like hitting the jackpot - you go if you’re lucky enough to find one.  I had no idea who Stephen Foster was but it turned out I knew his songs.  I expect almost everyone does.   I assumed as we drove into this park that he was born here, and the impressive antebellum mansion on the grounds was his home.  My heart sank as I realized there must be slave quarters here too as Foster’s music was from the 1800s (that much I knew), and a house this size obviously didn’t run itself.  Damn.  I remembere...

A word about the weather thus far: cold.  How cold?  I’m glad you asked.   Since we’ve been on the road we’ve had only a handful of days when it was actually warm enough to sit outside.  But we told ourselves we couldn’t really complain.  Our hometown suffered through one of the coldest and snowiest winters ever.  Our daughters in New York City refused to sympathize, and really, who could blame them? As we encountered one sub-freezing night and rig-rattling windstorm after another we told ourselves it would all change once we hit Florida.  Ah, Flahdah (as my Auntie Elaine calls it) - Snowbird Central.  We once visited her there in February and I finally understood the point of Florida.  I’d only ever been there on summer holidays with the girls and it was unremittingly ghastly for me.  I hate the heat and don’t get me started on the humidity. But Florida in February is a glorious place to be.  When it’s 60 degrees in the morning you...