what do yo get if you cross Lassie with a cantaloupe?

a melon-collie baby...

yesterday i sold the airstream. the silver train-car that sheltered us from kentucky to oregon and was our home for almost a year, the place my where my daughter learned to walk, a small constant space with ever-changing uncertainties outside it's door.

two years ago we decided to move to oregon. tiff had a job that promised a place to park our trailer and i figured i could find work. it took us a year to get out of lexington. many thanks to our friends who spent a year leaving parties at our house with more than they'd brought. thank god that two close friends bought new houses; our bedroom is set up at cousin sam's house and set up so exactly that it makes me feel like a historical figure visiting my own museum when i go there. almost as soon as we got the house empty and rented, tiff's job evaporated like pee on a woodstove (only a stink left in the air). so there we were, trailered up and no place to go. i got a job by phone, and i gotta tell you a speaker-phone interview with five people you've never met is a weird thing. it's hard to charm a disembodied collective of strangers. the trip across the country was stunningly awesome, unhurried and unplanned. we slipped into the province of thought native to all travelers where coincidence is a companion and schedules laughably inconsequential. that is, until we rolled into corvallis got out some maps and realized that there wasn't really any place to park a trailer around here. the trailer became a classroom for some tricky life lessons. how to live in a trailer park, how to exist with a wife, child, and two dogs in 74 sq feet of space, and how beer helps you accept the teaching that life lessons have to offer. finally the rain came and the trailer became an uncomfortable ark barely afloat in our sea of discontent. times were bad then and there's no more to say about that. we left the trailer with a small sense of defeat and a large sense of relief; our health and happiness had begun to suffer. happily ensconced in our 450 sq foot palace, dry, and with so much room to stretch out, i'm not sorry to see the trailer go but i'm very thankful that it got me from there to here.

i punched my ticket on a one way silver train
too damn tired of being the same
i'm going to wash my sins in the oregon rain
and maybe then i'll come home again