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Signs of Life

Nancy L. Horner

The Out-of-Towners

You learn to find entertainment in unusual places when you live in a small town.

Recently, my youngest son and I had a late lunch at a local fast-food restaurant. I placed my order and the tray of hot food arrived on the counter before the clerk handed me my change.

"Wow, that was fast!" I said.

"Saw ya comin'."

I smiled at the lady behind the counter. It was a scary possibility, I thought, that she knew I was going to say, "With no meat on it," before I even got to the cash register. Life in a small town has its advantages and disadvantages when it comes to familiarity.

We sat down with our food and were quietly eating when the counter people, milling about with no other customers in the dining area, stood up. "Oooh! Out-of-towners! Out-of-towners!" one of them said.

I looked up. Sure enough, there was no mistaking the fact that the folks in the parking lot were travelers. I'm not originally from Mississippi and the moment I open my mouth to speak it becomes apparent; but, I've been around long enough that I probably don't look out of place.

Not so with these folks. They'd parked their van and bullet-style trailer across 4 parking spaces and were slowly stretching cramped legs. They couldn't have looked less like they belonged if they tried.

'So that's what people are thinking when we walk into a small-town fast-food place while traveling', I thought, as I observed their body language. They looked hesitant in a "we're-not-from-these-parts" way. I've always wondered why the locals gazed at us with such fascination. Were we that obvious?

It took at least a good five minutes for the family to unload: Dad, in overalls and a t-shirt, pulled out a baby carrier and set it down on the ground; the top of a little blond head was barely visible. Mom emerged with a toddler on her hip and then two little boys in camouflage pants and a little girl dressed just like her mother, in a skirt and sneakers, bounded around the side of the van. Little bodies leaped up and over the trailer hitch until Mom and Dad were finally ready to head into the fast-food place.

I was playing a guessing game and having a rollicking good time observing while Will chomped away. The skirts and Mom's long ponytail without makeup, males with close-shaven hair, and quantity of children all seemed like pretty good hints. Arkansas, maybe? No, too close. They were definitely country folks; and they'd stretched as if they'd come a great distance. But how far? I watched with amusement as they took an equally lengthy time settling at two tables, then the father strolled to the counter, looked blank and turned around.

"What'a y'all want?" he asked.

Okay, Southern but definitely not the Mississippi drawl, I thought.

I told my 12-year-old that I was wildly guessing they were from Arkansas, although I thought they really had to be from farther away because they were so tired. "My guess, too," he said.

As we emerged into the parking lot, I barely could make out the license plate. It looked like a Florida plate on the car, but I wasn't about to walk around the length of the trailer to find out. I'd peek back as we exited the parking lot, I thought.

With the typical boldness of youth, Will walked directly to the back of the trailer. "Let's see where they came from," he said. I didn't bother attempting to stop him.

"Well?"

"Florida," he said. "I think. Yeah, Florida."

Florida. Huh.

I mulled on the revelation for a moment, reminded of a writer friend who said she grew up in a family of "Florida Crackers." Thinking crackers were defined as unleavened bread, I'd had to look the word up in the dictionary to find that the term was an often-derogatory reference used to describe a subculture within Florida and Georgia. She hadn't used the term in a derogatory sense, though. They were simply her people. Perhaps I'd just gotten a glimpse of her people, a subculture in a parking lot. Maybe. I'll probably never know. All I know is that they'd provided a few moments of engaging entertainment.

Sometimes you really do have to stretch to find entertainment when you live in a small town.