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Conrad Drives With Trailer

Yesterday, after coffee, I drove to Decorah, Iowa to get our trailer:  16 feet of battered, old, moving machine.  It is a lovely old friend, having moved us across the country before.  Harley Refsal once said that my Indian name was, "Drives With Trailer".

Not our trailer, but you get the idea.
The poor thing its almost thirty years old, and it has moved, not only us, but a number of trailerless friends.  All over the western half of the United States, there are keen, perceptive, and tidy people who lie sleepless, and rise up fearful, that they they will see our trailer in the driveway next door.

Imagine what it must be be like to see an octogenarian in Levis back an ugly trailer up the driveway next door!  "Are those chicken coops up on the roof?", you might very well ask.  "Are those mattresses under the chicken coops?"  "Is this, 'The Grapes of Wrath", all over again?"

It is not that I am completely insensitive.  I try to find places to hide the poor thing, which is as old, in trailer years, as I am in human years.

Once it was rammed from behind hard enough to rip it off the trailer hitch, and send it off alone, to destroy a Kansas Turnpike light pole.  It is on its third set of tires.  It has provided winter shelter for small critters, and summer shade for Minnesota glaciers.  Oil companies depend on our need for axle grease.  We get thank-you letters from roadside trailer repair shops which wonder when we shall stop by, again.

And today I drove to our log house property near Decorah, to hook up our trailer, again, so that we can move to Tucson, again, for the third time.  I swept the mouse nest out, not wanting to engage in a long dispute with the State of Arizona about their lack of photo-IDs.

"Drives With Trailer."

But let me defend myself.  I have never strapped a dog kennel to the roof of the trailer:  never!  And about those chickens:  they ride in the back seat of the pickup; not outside on the trailer.  But I do not want to be President.

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