She would never want to live in a trailer. That’s what she said. And repeated it about every five or ten minutes. He needed change, he insisted, and he needed change sooner rather than later. Their debate didn’t bother me a bit. I was drinking a jammy red from a Reidel glass, sinking into a plush leather couch, pondering intoxication. It had been nice of them to invite me in for a meal and a shower. To let me stay here on their couch. The wine was a bonus. I’d have to be careful not to drink too much, to take advantage of their generosity.

His laptop was open on the Ikea coffee table and he was quoting Henry David Thoreau on simple living. Some woman tried to give Thoreau a rug, the man said, and Thoreau didn’t want the rug. He didn’t have room in his hut for the rug. All true environmentalists live in huts, the man said. A trailer is the contemporary Walden shack. Not three-bedroom single family homes in the suburbs. He’d been scoping out Airstreams on eBay.

She was curled up in what looked like an antique chair, plush upholstery and carved wooden arms. She gestured around the room at her pottery  and her books. She contended the art and the words grounded her, kept her in a solid place. She could not admit out loud that she liked Things. Enjoyed collecting them and piling them up around her. Buoys and anchors. Buoys and anchors.

He counted with, baby, we need to streamline, need to eliminate and concentrate. You know you have too much shit, he said. You need to prioritize. Live like a minimalist. Material things bog you down. They bog us down. All the stuff. You don’t own it. It owns you. Ta-dum. Ta-dum. Ta-dum.

His long bangs draped over the laptop’s keyboard, face basking in the glow of a 15-inch Retina display.

But it’s not even about the stuff, she continued, trailers were unsafe as dwellings, trailers moved about at the owner’s whim. Parked on this lot or that lot. Flimsy when the gusts came, the bad ones. She said this. Big bad gusts seemed now to form the bulk of her expressed discontent. I noted. Without commenting.

She began a story about her neighbor Elmer Jorgensen, whose roof blew off in the microburst of 1973. Phillips, Wisconsin. Price County. Historic weather event. You can Google it, she said. She’d been eight years old when it happened. Elmer’s wife Marge was taking a nap on the couch. In my dreams, Marge had told her, in my dreams I heard a train rolling down the tracks. I opened my eyes and saw it go. The roof lifted up like the lid of a gift box. It flew into the woods, leaving me there on the couch with the wind and rain. That’s what Marge said in this story she recounted from her childhood.

Elmer and Marge had vacated the roofless trailer and waited out the storm in a storage shed, seemingly solid. It seemed somehow safer than their eight year old Ford F100. Some of their stuff blew out of the trailer and off into the forest. Much of it was soaked by torrential precipitation, including their wedding photos and baby photos and toddler photos and the tissue paper flower given to Marge by their six-year-old daughter Cecilia. Cecilia with the tumor in her brain. Cecilia who would not reach her seventh birthday. The girl had made the flower during a rare visit to bible school at a nearby church. For Mother’s Day.

Marge cherished the clump of fading tissue. It had sat in a vase atop Cecilia’s coffin. And after that, Marge kept it close. On a shelf over the widescreen TV.

Then. The roof was gone. The paper flower met a sudden soggy end.

She told him this story. I yawned because it was getting late.

#

That was why she never wanted to live in a trailer. It wasn’t about the stuff. It was about the roof.

And because she loved space. Hated a kitchen in which she could barely turn around. Needed a long counter to slice and dice and knead proto-sourdough loaves.

He could live in a trailer and be a good environmentalist. She would stay here in their three-bedroom house in the suburbs, she said. With her books and her art. And her paper flowers, speaking metaphorically. She told him this, finally, divulging divulgements, divulgosity.

She doesn’t exist, she told him finally, without her books, art and paper flowers.

I noted that the couple well into a third bottle of red wine, a 2010 zinfandel. I was enjoying red raspberries, a viscous mouth feel and black pepper on the finish. The man reached over the table and poured more wine into my glass. What do you think? he asked me. And I repeated my impression. Fruit forward, great long finish.

I mean about simple living, he said. You live simply. He pointed to my sack on the floor. You love it, right? I set down my book and quoted the Tao: “We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”

Speaking of clay, she darted back in, she doesn’t want to exist, she continued, without the ceramic cat that her sister had made in a college pottery class. And her high school diploma. And some photos of mom and dad, before the accident.

She never wanted to live in a trailer.

Because people die, she said, and the man and I furrowed brows at what seemed a non sequitur. She gleaned things from people, fragile people, temporal people. She was trying to explain. As one day, eventually, people would glean things from her.

He poured more wine into her glass.

#

She told another story. She said she’d visited the houses of poet Pablo Neruda in South America. In Chile. One in Valpairaso and another on Isla Negro. And a third house in Santiago, in the shadow of Cerro San Cristobal. All of Neruda’s houses were packed full of shit that the poet had collected on his travels. Tapestries and tarot cards and toilets and seashells and bits of boats and glassware and maps and spoons and a narwhal tusk that Neruda bought with the money he’d been given for winning the Nobel prize in 1971. Two years before he died of a heart broken over the death of leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende in a U.S.-backed coup.

She described all of this to him. But I couldn’t tell if he was listening as he clickity clacked on his keyboard. I went outside for a cigarette, flicking ashes into the dregs of an almost-empty bottle. When I came back in, she was still telling the story.

Neruda did not live in a trailer, she said. He crammed Things into the expanses of three large houses. He collected Things to ward off that menacing mortality, as if his stuff could protect him from the abyss. The waves, the waves. Neruda feared the ocean. He owned a boat but never ventured out into the Pacific. His identity emerged from stuff. Have you guys read the theory, she asked, of Thingitude? Thingitude that explains this negotiation between Objects and Selfiness.

Selfiness. I repeated this and they both looked at me, remembering I was there for a half second but no longer.

In that moment, I vibed the sturdy walls all around her, staving off exterior atmosphere, solid enough to withstand fierce gales of coming winter. Solid like a mountain. Solid like a tomb.

And, she said, furthermore, she said, you can’t stop global weirding, not by living in a trailer. The problem’s bigger than that. She said. And she said. And she said.

And he said, I know, I know, as he typed in a bid on a vintage 1967 Airstream, 24 feet long. The tires have decent tread, he said. The tires have decent tread. Two thousand five hundred dollars. It needs some work I know, he said.

I will never live in a trailer, she said, and my head was feeling heavy. Air staid, steady pressure of indoor doldrums.  Tummy full. Slight buzz. He was plotting a move to Maui, and she was complaining with Hawaii’s howling trade winds as I dozed off. She’d given me a small blanket and a soft pillow and I said thanks. Super nice people, they were.