In the late 1990s, my family got a basement tenant: my grandmother. After years of aging largely alone in Los Angeles, she came north to join us in Petaluma. My mother moved out her sewing machines from the downstairs space she used as an art studio and moved in her fire-haired mother.
A year or so later, my grandmother — her trademark scoff robust as ever, my mom’s patience less so — moved into her own place. Housing options for elderly people in California were slim then, as now. For those with little to fall back on, such as retired public school teachers — my grandmother taught art — it was particularly tough. Lacking the nest egg of a home whose value had skyrocketed, or much savings at all, she ended up in that often-mocked American community: a trailer park.
The Leisure Lake Mobile Home Park was my grandmother’s final home before she went into a care facility. She died in 2006, but I’ve been thinking about her final years lately, and about the ways we can age.
The park was, and still appears to be, a nicely landscaped warren of narrow roads lined with trailers, and a faux lake running through the middle. Her neighbors were pleasant, or at least private.