Letter To My Brother

Good Luck Modern RV Park - South Dallas

 Thinking of you this morning...hence another envelope of photos.

 

     Years ago, when we made the decision to move back to Utah from Texas, our house sold in just a week and we had to be out of the house within three weeks. We lived in our trailer for several months when we moved to Texas...Danna lived in it for nine months and because I stayed longer in Utah to finish up the school year, I lived in the trailer for four months while our house was being built. So, once again, we moved into our trailer and lived in South Dallas for nine months.

     South Dallas is a very poor Dallas suburb. The RV Park we lived in, the Good Luck Modern, was filled with very poor people with a few people like us scattered throughout the park. It's hard to explain the level of poverty in the park. The RV Park was built in the sixties and was once a beautiful place. Each site had a fence around it which was nice so we could let the Bassets outside to play and potty. Oddly, I felt safe there and I walked through the park every day. The trailers around us were old and many of them were falling apart and were being held together with duct tape, tarps and plywood. The vehicles in the park were in no better shape. But it was the dirt on the ground that felt most like poverty to me. It was black and oily and littered with bits of people's lives who lived there before me.

     While on my daily walk I carried my camera. For a while I thought I'd try to capture the sad condition of the place, but I began to feel it would be an invasion of privacy to photograph the homes of those who lived there...because I, being privileged, would never understand how it feels to be poor.

     So, I pointed my camera upwards. I called my collection of photos "Above the Trailer Series." I took a lot of photos of things above the trailers and occasionally I would take photos of flowers growing on ancient chain-link fencing. In that poor place, flowers still grew and provided beauty and hope. 

      I only have a few photos left and they aren't my favorites, but I'll share them with you to give you an idea of what I was doing. 

      I learned a lot while living in South Dallas. Sometimes I was the only white girl in the store. It was an unusual feeling to say the least. A homeless couple helped me at the laundromat. I looked forward to their help every week. I went to look for them to say goodbye before leaving Texas. I'll always be sad that I wasn't able to tell them how much they meant to me.

     Take care...my heart is with you...be well...and recover!