Trailer Trash and Spider Dogs

When I was 29, I walked away from my children's father. Well, truth be told, he'd walked away from me ages before, having his way with several women.

I turned a blind eye for years. I wasn't good enough to keep a man. He told me so, over and over. Too scrawny, too mouthy, and with 3 kids to boot, no man would ever want me, or them. Terrified, I hung on to the little I had, proud in some perverse way that at least my boys had both a mother and a father in the home.

Until 30 approached. It was 2001. He was running around with Linda, the chubby blonde that was supposed to be MY friend, Diane, the older woman in the kitchen of his workplace and Shirley, a clever single mother who was duped, for about 5 minutes, by him.

Something in me snapped. I had 3 boys, one entering double digits, and the others 8 and 6. I threw him out. He put his hands around my throat for the last time. He took me to the floor for the last time. I stood firm. And he went.

The kids and I didn't have much. We had a broken-down old trailer. Mobile home, if you please. We lived in a trailer park. Oh, wait, mobile home community. Yeah, no, trailer park.

And not just a trailer park, a trailer park on the edge of the richest community in the province. So, there were my kids on one side of town and millionaires' kids on the other.

I worked at a coffee shop, grinning my ass off for 25 cents above minimum wage and tips every single day. I got most of our groceries with those tips.

They had friends from school that weren't allowed to visit because we lived "over there." We were "those people."

The first summer we were on our own, I remember my oldest son being quite down. He was 10 and missed the friends he'd made during the school year. And he knew why. Kids are smart. They know a lot more than we think they do.

To cheer him up, I told him he could invite a couple of his buddies over for a sleepover. He chose 3 boys, one that lived in the trailer park and two others that didn't. Two accepted and were permitted to spend the night. The other wasn't.

I dipped into my meagre Christmas savings to buy a broken-down old outdoor fireplace I'd seen in a nearby yard with a sign on it. It was only $20. My neighbour helped me fix it with his rudimentary but effective welding skills and I set it up smack dab in the middle of my tiny postage stamp yard.

I got some wood, some treats, marshmallows, juice, pop, chips and of course, hot dogs. I was determined to make the sleepover special and what could be more fun for a group of young boys than a campfire cookout?

The night of the sleepover, the spider dog was born. And it was legendary.

I'm not sure where I'd heard about spider dogs. But I knew I'd heard about them somewhere. The idea sat there, in the back of my mind for goodness knows how long, just waiting for the right moment to raise itself to consciousness.

I went inside my 14x72" mobile unit and grabbed a knife. I poked a stick into each hot dog, right in the middle, then sliced each side down, twice, to make 4 "legs" on each side. I handed one to each boy

Roasted over a fire, the legs darkened and curled to resemble a spider. And the kids loved them!

My little trailer yard soon became the place to be for the 6 to 10 crowd. Each weekend that I didn't work, there was a sleepover, a cookout and spider dogs. The boys each took turns inviting friends. The oldest one week, the middle the next and the youngest the week after that, and so on.

Everyone who was anyone was in that little yard. Kids whose parents were reluctant to allow their children anywhere near "poor trailer trash" were suddenly calling to enquire about my sons' invitation, at least willing to entertain the notion. They had lots of questions

Who was I? Where did I come from? Where did I work? Would there be adequate supervision?

Some parents came over. They wanted to meet me. For coffee they usually said, but it was more of an evaluation. I was okay with that. I didn't let my kids just go to anyone's house without knowing where they were going either.

They looked around my home. searching for something that screamed poor or undesirable. They never found it because it was never there. I was poor, my kids were not. My kids had what they needed and most of what they wanted. My home, humble as it was, was clean, orderly and full of food.

And so they let their kids come. They let them come to my backyard. They let them come to my little trailer. We'd blast Britney Spears and Limp Bizkit because it was 2000. And the kids made smores, roasted marshmallows and talked and giggled. And of course, they had spider dogs.

The boys were fascinated by them. How they curled up the way they did. How they had 8 crispy legs. They marvelled at the miracle of turning a simple hotdog into something so "way cool."

Those summer evenings, my boys forgot their troubles. They forgot about the father that had no time for his kids. They forgot about the differences between them and their wealthier pals. And they forgot the words "trailer trash." All because I figured out how to cut up a Weiner on a stick.

Today, those boys, those little pieces of so-called trailer trash are wonderful, successful young men. One is a former Pharmaceutical Chemist, turned music producer. One is a brilliant writer and one is out west in the petrochemical industry.

And when we get together for summer campfires, they still ask me to make spider dogs.