by Phyllis McCrossin

I am probably the Mrs. Gladys Kravitz (of the original “Bewitched” TV sitcom fame) for the Kal Haven Outpost campground.

Our home is parked next to the main entrance of the campground so I can often sit in the “living room” and watch the comings and goings of fellow campers.

Last night a huge fifth-wheel trailer pulled in. I watched as first the truck appeared in my view and then the trailer, and the trailer and the trailer. Today, I can lean back and look out the window and watch as they continue to set up their camp. The trailer was a “toy hauler” and this morning they backed a gator/golf cart thing out of the back end. The ramp then becomes a sort of outdoor seating area. They also set up a free-standing canopy. It’s a nice setup.

Before the pandemic shut things down last winter, King, our daughter and I took an afternoon and looked at new travel trailers. I have to confess we didn’t bother looking at the bigger models or the fifth wheels. It wasn’t so much the price tags as it was the length.

Neither one of us has a desire to pull (and park) anything longer than 20 feet. That pretty much puts us in what manufacturers label as the “Weekender” category. Evidently they don’t think one can live full-time in small spaces. It takes some compromise, but it is doable.

We are enjoying our life in our “weekender” and we continue to work to make our tiny house a home.

Last week King and I traveled to Grand Haven to help our son finish painting and putting up trim on his house. Well, King helped. I played with the grandkids. It gave us the opportunity to go through the nine remaining boxes of stuff we have stored in our son’s tool shed. I came home with a 1945 edition of the “Joy of Cooking” (which was a wedding gift to my mother), a few prints my mother had in her home, the Bible that was given to me when I joined Haven Reformed Church as a teen, and a couple of trivets.

There are still a few boxes remaining that contain small appliances. They are doing little more than gathering dirt and mold. I thought I might save their content for the day we need to move into an apartment. Now I am not so sure. I’m doing well with the set of cheap pots and pans, a single knife and plastic mixing bowls I use daily in the trailer.

So, I started eliminating even more “stuff” and gave a juicer and the picnic basked it had been stored in to our daughter-in-law. I have a food dehydrator that I will give to the first daughter or daughter-in-law who says she wants it. I have bread pans and a few other things that can go to Goodwill.

Those treasures we decided to keep we brought home and spent a day or two looking for places to display them. We live in 160 square feet. There is not a lot of wall space.

Our eclectic home has now become even more so. It’s become the Brady Bunch 1970s kitchen meets a 1980s rust and orange dining room meets my mother’s Early American décor. The trailer now has a few sentimental things that will only mean something to me.

The Early American prints were a gift from me to Mom when said she wanted something for above their bed. There are two trivets in the kitchen. One was a gift to Mom when the church’s Women’s Guild group had a Secret Santa gift exchange in 1965. (There is a date and name on it). The other trivet I bought for her in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg, Russia) when I was an exchange student to Finland in 1973. There is also a glass vase my Finnish family gave my mother that same summer. The cookbook is tucked away with a homemade Glenn United Methodist Church cookbook that has a few recipes from Mom in it.

Seven sentimental items and a sewing machine – that’s not so hard for kids to get rid of when King and I are gone, right?

Although it’s not much of a garage sale, is it?