Book Review: Our Little Corner of the Trailer Park

Our Little Corner is not your typical southern trailer park book. The characters are not (pick one - mentally challenged, physically handicapped, disfigured) or sleeping with their (pick one - uncle, aunt, first cousin, second cousin, step-brother, step-sister). Nor do they make their living by (pick one - poaching, collecting multiple welfare checks by using several identities or addresses, prostitution.)

Our Little Corner is the work of 91-year-old Dixie Dee Gates Scriber, known informally as Dee. Dee has always loved to write and some of her vignettes of rural southern life were published over the years in the Natchitoches Times. Our Little Corner is some of her stories that appeared in the Times, as well as never before published stories.

The book is about 300 pages re-telling events that took place in the '70's and '80's. These short tellings, about three or four pages each, are told in the descriptive style that it seems that only southerners can master. If you have seen the movie or play Steel Magnolias or the television program Designing Women you know what I mean. Southerners can speak and write in metaphors that delight and start knee-slapping laughter. Southerners compare things that were never before compared. This produces insight and a new way of looking at what are usually ordinary events. And in some cases, southern metaphors can amuse while illuminating a moral teaching. That's why southerners can often be "preachy" and not offend - they're just too amusing to offend.

You know you are in for a treat with Dee's first tale about friendship with hippies "living off the land" temporarily in her neighborhood. Other topics Dee enlightens us about are exercise, the early days of retirement, going to confession to a hard of hearing priest, bad investments and owing the IRS. Anything and everyone is a potential subject to Mrs. Scriber, especially her husband, Robert, now deceased, to whom the book is dedicated.

Our Little Corner of the Trailer Park is Dee's humorous look at her life with neighbors and family, and, sometimes, strangers. It is the story of struggles without bitterness and marital disappointments overshadowed by love. It's a work of humor that encourages patience and perseverance. It is a gift from Dee.

Our Little Corner of the Trailer Park is available for $10.95 at The Book Merchant in Natchitoches or over the internet e-mail jmichael@thebookmerchant.com.

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