Hey you guys!  So my plan was originally to hang out with my friend J in the RV park in East Texas where he has been living the past few months, studying and acting as a platonic housewife in exchange for room and board.  He moves around a lot with his job, usually living in rural areas or small towns, and lives in a travel trailer.  But last week his plans changed unexpectedly and he told me that we were going to be doing some traveling instead.  Because my field study is on space and place and their effects on our consciousness, and because I secretly harbor the heart of a gypsy, this sounded even better than my original plan.

J picked me up on Friday at my mom’s house in Houston where I had been visiting for a few days.  We spent the night in his trailer in an RV park in Jacksonville, TX, then got up early on Saturday to get things ready to go to Kentucky where he inherited a house and wanted to go to check on things.  While we were prepping the truck and trailer, he informed me that I would be driving his pickup, pulling the travel trailer while he drove his big service truck.   I assumed that I would be doing some of the driving but was not really prepared for this.  I grew up with my father doing the same kind of work that J does and was accustomed to the sudden packing up and moving that comes with the lifestyle, but have never driven anything larger than a conversion van, so I was pretty scared.  He rode with me driving for a while, giving me pointers on turning and braking, and how to account for pulling a small house behind the me.  When I got a little more comfortable (I still had a death grip on the steering wheel, but my hands had stopped going numb), we stopped, parked the trailer, and went back for his service truck.  It took a lot longer to get to Texarkana than it should have, but we finally got there and stopped for the night in an RV park with hands-down the nicest bathroom I’ve ever seen at a campground.  We drove for the next two days, making a lot of stops, both to give me a break and to make some repairs on the vehicles.  We finally got to Kentucky on Tuesday morning.  Since then I have been doing a lot of reading, mostly The Eyes of the Skin, Space and Place, and the Tuesday texts, exploring the tiny nearby town, and helping clean up the house and acre of land it’s on.

We are in a fairly rural area, but with so many churches I don’t see how there are enough people to attend, unless they all go to more than one church every week.  Every time I have gone into town so far, someone stops me and asks what church I belong to, assuming that I am Pentecostal because of my long hair and dresses.  Needless to say, they are a little taken aback when I turn and they notice my facial piercings (more common in small towns than they used to be, but still not de rigeur) and dark eyeliner.  It’s kind of funny.

We don’t have any definite plans right now.  There is still some work to be done on the property, and J has business to attend to in Illinois, West Virginia, and New Mexico, as well as having a line on a job in Pennsylvania.  I am trying to learn to be more patient and to be comfortable with uncertainty, so I suppose not knowing where I will sleep tomorrow is good for me.

Houston, seen through a very dirty windshield.

Somewhere in Arkansas.

Welcome to Kentucky.