there is a story, from my childhood. i posted something about all the times i've moved
well, there is a particularly horrible story behind one of these moves. .....i'm sure it's affected me....but at the time it was happening my parents didn't explain what was going on and being a naive and fairly cloud bound child i didn't catch on to what was going on at the time.

i'll start at the beginning. of this story...and explain how we got where we were.

first off, my dad was renting property that was about 6 acres of land. the front part was a log yard, complete with a VERY old saw mill, only good for rough cutting, and a planer....used to smooth lumber fit to sell,
this was my first job, stacking the lumber as it came off the planer, i was between 10 and 12  when i did this job.
my dad had a portable sawmill that he set up a little behind this......
back at the very end of the property we had our house set up....a  large double wide mobile home.
well....this was when the timber industry first started it's massive downward spiral.
i was 10 at the time.
my father was offered a job on a ranch on the big island in hawaii. running a sawmill there that specialized in the koa hardwood.
he went to check it out.....he was gone for two weeks. he came back. said it was absolutely wonderful.
his boss was great, the job was great. we'd have a beautiful house on the ranch, we'd have horses, it was going to be wonderful.
my dad sold his equipment, bought a truck trailer....(the kind that can be transported by ship, truck, or train) and we packed all our things into it.
we sold our house....let the lease go on our property, and bought a 4wheel drive truck for the ranch....we were to have it shipped over later.
it's cheaper to buy a vehicle on the mainland, and have it sent by ship than it is to purchase a vehicle on the island. it was the first new vehicle we'd ever owned.
we found homes for our pets. (quarantine would last 6 months, we decided it would be better to leave them behind)
we moved out and were staying with friends until our plane was to leave in a week.
our belongings would be shipped out 3 days after our arrival and would get there in approximately one month.
we were so excited.....we'd already moved SO many times. this was going to be the last move hopefully forever.

we got a phone call 2 days before our plane left.
the job was no longer available.
my uncle who worked as a limo driver for the logging company asked questions around and found out that the current foreman was afraid for his promotion he was due. he was convinced that in a very short time my father would get the promotion he thought that he deserved. my dad is a very hard and intelligent worker and generally did do very well in physically demanding jobs.

we were devastated. we didn't know what we were going to do.
we were now homeless.
jobless
we sold the new truck, and stayed with the people we were staying with for another month.

we moved into a hotel when we felt we could not impose ourselves on these people any longer. 2 months in a hotel ...even a cheap one where you hear gun shots every night, is expensive! this is where so much of my dad's money went. he was trying to buy his equipment back too......very little luck.....he did manage to keep his large portable sawmill.

we moved into a tiny little mobile on my grandfathers small piece of property next to his house. this wasn't good either....it wasn't home.....it was imposing.

dad came home one night and said he'd found a place where he could set up his mill.....a man named pete had promised he'd have all the lumber dad could saw. a steady income and a place for us to put our small house. there was no other choice. we couldn't stay where we were, there was no where else left to go.

when we moved to this place, it was the most depressing, dirty place my mother had ever seen. (i was a kid, and used to mud, this didn't even register with me) i've seen pictures now...and i can't believe we lived there. ......the man pete, had cleared a piece of land for us......he took his bulldozer and pushed mud, trash, broken furniture, old cars, etc. up into a wall around three sides of the place where we were to live......(he hadn't shown us this part, he'd shown us a nicely treed, grassy place) our neighbors had the most run down old shacks i can remember, and dirty dirty children......i remember one neighbor had 14 dogs all milling around in a pen in the back of her house.
dad called them shake rats, they were paid to use a splitter to make shakes for the roofs of houses.
my mother broke down. the house fell apart.
my mother had never been the worlds greatest house keeper......but it had never been this bad. i learned to cook, ...i figured out how to turn the stove on and read the directions off of boxes, dad taught me how to boil potatoes, and make stew,
mom shut down. after all we'd been through she couldn't handle any more. she would turn on her radio and write down a record of all her favorite songs that she'd listened to during better times. i still have that card file box somewhere.maybe not...maybe i threw it away, i hope i threw it away, i don't think i could stand to look at it again......every song from between 1955 when she was born, and 1979....when she stopped listening to new music....alphabetized by artist, the songs that played on the radio by them listed underneath, their place on the charts by each song.....hundreds of songs.
and that's what she did.
lay in bed (the house only had one small bedroom, so my parents bed was in the living room) and wrote songs and artists down on 3x5 cards....for months on end.
i was somewhere between 10 and 12 at this time...i don't even remember. and i didn't know what i was doing. i didn't know how to take care of a house.
it got dirtier and dirtier. the clothes piled higher and higher......i remember my dad coming in and doing laundry, a couple times a week maybe....dad was never home. i'm not sure what he was doing. repairs on his equipment probably. but he was gone 18 hours a day.
i remember dad taking a snow shovel to the floor and shoveling stuff into the trash.
mom had shut down completely.
my sister and i ran wild. we played with the neighbor kids.
we played in the dirt. the mud,
we explored ....not very safe places. old abandoned mobile homes, old cars, garbage piles,

well.....there were no logs to saw.....and it was going on a few weeks....and still no logs.....and dad went to pete and he says, we're running out of money for food, and school is starting soon and the kids need new shoes. and pete says...oh..the logs will be here soon.....take this check and you can pay me back when the logs come in and you get paid for the lumber.
so we'd spend the check....and a few more weeks went by..... and dad went to pete.....and pete says ...sorry, i don't know what's happened to that load of logs that we were supposed to get.....i'll check into it.....here....this should tide you over.....and hand over another check.

"just do this little job for me" .......oh..."just do this other little job for me"
he's getting free labor....as interest on all the money people owe him.....he pays them BARELY enough to survive. ...and he's getting free labor.

dad started talking to the neighbors. they all turn out to be drug addicts.....this is the days before meth.....and alcoholics, ....you can smell it...and see the tracks and the eyes.
and they say..this is what he did to us......we can't leave....we owe him so much money, we owe him everything, we've tried to leave, and he blocks the road with his bulldozer and his trucks, and all we have are our houses and our vehicles and we can't leave because he says we owe him so much money that our houses are his.

one night.....dad comes home with a roll of duct tape......and we don't even bother to pack. he duct tapes the cupboards shut. he duct tapes the furniture in place. we put only our clothes into suitcases, because we don't know where we are going...and we don't know where our house is going to end up. he found a couple of friends from outside that have trucks, our truck pulls the sawmill, a friends truck pulls our house, and another friends truck pulls the big cargo trailer that was going to be shipped to hawaii.....it has all my childhood things in it....my toys.....my furniture...everything....i don't see it again until i'm 15. because there is no where to unpack.

and mom falls on the ground and refuses to leave.
she can't move again she cries.
and she cries.
as horrible as this place is...she can't do it again.
not again she cries.
she tries to bargain with him.....why can't we wait till morning???

and dad picks her up tells her he doesn't care that she doesn't want to leave we're leaving anyway., he's over 6'2 and used to rolling logs by hand. he's 300lbs of pure muscle at this point....and puts her in the cab of the truck. she's 5'2. petite. she didn't stand  a chance.

i'm in the back seat of the crew cab, listening to him try to explain to her why we are leaving in the middle of the night.....

pete has gone on vacation....and will be gone for the weekend....and if we don't leave right now his crew will tell him we are trying to leave while we still owe him money and he will have them block the roads.

mom stops crying.....but i've never seen the mom i had before this ever again.