this is the kind of beauty the foothills hold

this is the kind of beauty the foothills hold

disgusted with the school i was going to and their administrations inability to do their job, coupled with not getting the education i was paying for, i decided to drop out at the beginning of the new fall quarter. my boyfriend and our dogs moved back to the foothills of north carolina to wait for me while i worked on a student film that lasted until about the end of the first week of october. once i moved back in with my sweety, i tried to relax and unpack and make that house as homey for us as we could. we didn’t delude ourselves, we knew we couldn’t stay their long. it wasn’t big enough and it wasn’t in what anybody would call great shape.

it was in novemeber i started looking at new places to rent, even though we couldn’t afford to move again so quickly. i just wanted to keep my eyes out and see how the market for such a thing was. the sad news is that every week more and more places were opening up for rent because people were abandoning the area due to rapid job loss. factory after factory in this area was closing it’s doors. even worse is the small family owned businesses couldn’t make ends meet with people losing jobs and they too were closing down. me finding a job because harder and harder to do. even going to the employment security commission didn’t help. no job openings that i was qualified for in the area and what ones were open, literally hundreds of people were applying for, even part time positions and crappy retail

this is the point where i started daydreaming of “what if” if scenarios and the haunting words of steven filled my mind as he packed up the moving truck in savannah “it would be nice if the next time we moved, it was into a place we owned.” i started looking and we made mention of it to a few people. not that that is exactly what we were looking for, but a “wouldn’t it be nice…” kind of way. somebody got wind of it! a co-worker from christopher’s job. they knew they were about to be laid off (as was christopher) and knew they couldn’t pay the mortgage on their trailer they rented. they asked us to come and look it one morning, because the bank was about to foreclose.

it wasn’t pretty. granted so many people already have preconceptions about the word “trailer” as it is, but i have been in many of them that didn’t fit said preconceptions and were just downright amazing, sturdy, and nicely done. this was not one of those. worse off, it was in a trailer park. steven and i are pretty private people (yes, i know, a public blog contradicts that, but you’re not within shouting distance and a nice emotional distance is built between internet writer and reader. it’s kind of comforting.) and not very keen on neighbors that close, least of all the reputation noisy trailer parks have and oh the gossip. and if we’re paying for our own home, we don’t really want to listen to somebody else’s rules on how we should live and how many people we can have over and all that jazz that trailer park land owners enforce. all  that just fuels the never ending drama in such parks in this area. we politely looked the place over and declined, respectfully, to buy the trailer. the cost of trailer itself (not the land) was around 50k. it was going to be monthly payments of about 400$ plus land rental. not our style.

i continued looking after that. our spirits feeling kinda squashed, so the boys weren’t so excited after that let down, but i was rekindled. i kept looking and searching. i even called a few places and drove by a couple of places, but this was for rentals. even though we couldn’t even afford to think of moving at this point, the house we were in was falling apart even worse than before.  the electric didn’t work half the time due to how old it was, there was no heat and nights were getting below 35 degrees. the bathroom was like ice all the time due to not being done correctly.it was crowded for the 3 of us and two dogs. i suspected our neighbors of selling recreational but illegal things (didn’t we move away from that when we were in savannah? city and rural illness i guess).  we didn’t even have all of our possesions there. we had to rent a storage unit for a good chunk of my furniture and studio supplies. i even had to leave some stuff behind at a friends house in savannah. needless to say, we had to leave that place, but we had no cash. ever hopeful, i eventually eased back and looked for the RENT TO OWN.

by the time new years rolled around, steven was picking up those little HOMES magazines for buying cause i would just look at houses way out of our price range and we would go off into dream land and talk about what it would be like to live in such places. little did we know that one of those magazines will have an ad to the house we currently live in and i would question the price as some kind of typo.