For many people, there’s no place like (mobile) home

My parents’ first home was a trailer, white with turquoise trim, with a fold-out bay window.

They moved it from Port Royal, South Carolina, where my brother was born, to Odessa, Texas, where I made my appearance.

My mom was 19 and far from her family in New Zealand. Her 21-year-old Marine husband worked long hours.

But in the trailer park, she found an instant neighborhood. There were lots of young families. My mom sewed for a woman who did her hair in return.

In the evenings, my mom barbecued under the patio cover, the only woman in a line of men doing the same, chatting as they kept an eye on their grills. (My dad said grilling was a communist plot to make men cook.)

It felt like a family.

Republic real-estate reporter Catherine Reagor wrote recently about how mobile-home parks are falling victim to rising home prices and land values.

It’s a shame.

The parks offer affordable housing and often the kind of community I remember. There wasn’t as much of that when we moved to Arizona, where every house had a 6-foot fence and people drove into their garages as the automatic doors shut behind them.

Now I tap dance on Saturday mornings in the clubhouse of a manufactured home park for seniors in Tempe. Mondays are for water aerobics, the game is on in the billiards room on the weekends, and there’s a puzzle half done on a folding table that anyone can work on.

The bulletin board is filled with notices about tea, barbecues, food drives, a dance. There’s a sign-up sheet to make food for someone who is sick.

Sometimes, in tap class, we daydream about living in the park when we retire. Rhonda picked the manufactured home with a porch where she’ll host happy hour.

I have dibs on the one next door. It’s white with turquoise trim.