I have never smoked. I despise smoky rooms and avoid public entryways with strewn cigarette butts and exhaled vapors from the mouths and noses of strangers. Still, a faint magnetic pull urges me to fill my own bronchial tubes deeply of tobacco smoke, hold the crest of it like a surfer’s wave until it rolls, dragon-like, out. The faint wafting of a cigarette on a breeze can set off this hankering, most likely linked to my childhood when cigarette packages were just beginning to post warnings.

Both my parents smoked in the house, and the car as we traveled. I hated it as an older teen. It embarrassed me. They were not cool smokers. Mom did not hold her cigarette elegantly with delicate, manicured fingers like the magazine adds. Dad didn’t pinch his like a cowboy, take a puff then throw it off like you could afford to waste it in the road. Thiers was the stuff of addiction.

To be fair, tobacco, on the Rosebud Reservation of South Dakota where I grew up, is a traditional substance. Smoked in ceremonial pipes and included in medicine bundles, it is still used to gift and honor. My sister picked wild sage with a traditional friend recently. The friend explained that when taking things from Unci Maka, or grandmother earth, one must give something back in return. She carried a small pouch of tobacco in her purse and dipping into it, she deposited pinches of it onto the South Dakota prairie with gratitude.                

A newly retired ranch couple, moved in just down the street from us in the early 1970s. Their faces made aged leather look smooth. Their skin was born of an adulthood spent entirely in the sun and wind. After a year in town, they would lighten to a degree, but retain the yellow cast of a lifetime of Camel cigarettes.

They were older than my parents, long time generational neighbors, their ranch being less than two miles from my grandparent’s home place. For years of hard work, they rewarded themselves with a brand-new white with gold trim trailer home on the northwest edge of Mission, South Dakota. On nice summer evenings, my parent’s occasionally walked the short block to visit. I would tag along bearing garden produce.

I was fascinated by the trailer’s diminutive size. It was like a dollhouse for humans, fresh, shiny, and just about everything was built in. Black wrought iron divided the white and gold Formica-wrapped kitchen from the mod sunken living room. You actually had to take two steps to get down. The dark wood-paneled accents were like pictures in magazines. I crossed the spongy gold, wall-to-wall shag carpet, thinking I should have taken off my shoes. The thought was two-fold. First, I would have impressed them as being a polite, mannerly child and second, I could have felt this rich, blanket-on-the-floor softness with my bare feet. I didn’t have socks on.

I felt honored to nestle into the gold, green and brown sofa inhaling the new smell of Scotchgard-treated fabric. “A spill will just wipe right off,” Helen announced inches away through a fleur-de-lis in the wrought iron divider. It barely separated us. Feeling its cushy firmness, I enjoyed the mixed aroma— perking coffee and newly lit cigarettes, while Helen explained how the sofa was “built using exact specs by the trailer factory…fits right into the nook”.

Opposite me was the TV. Wondering if it was color or black and white, I wasn’t bold enough to ask to turn it on. Experiencing their new trailer was entertainment enough. The wall behind the metal-legged TV stand was a mottled white-brown paneled weave. It would never need repainting.

Above the TV, hanging symmetrically in a line, were four black and gold filigreed diamond-shaped wall hangings. Each diamond had a bird perching on a different variety of leafy branch. The birds had the same shape as the barn swallows in the mud nest above my bedroom window. Their highlights matched the gold trim of the TV stand perfectly.          

After stacking several hundred acres of hot hay for their cows every summer and mowing the front yard of the ranch house when they had extra time, Helen and Eck now had a dandelion and pigweed corner lot no more than 30 by 75 feet. No garage, or outbuildings to maintain, they had a small, bright metal shed for a new push mower, a gas can, and a few lawn tools. Instead of a half-acre garden, Helen planted a rose bush and four tomato plants.

Helen pointed out the simple plastic dial you turned for heat in the living room. “There’s a baseboard in each room,” she explained. For cooling, there was a built-in air conditioner also ran by a dial. It made open windows and clunky fans obsolete.

“We can do whatever we damn well please now,” Eck said. “No wind, snow, or sweating in the heat”. He didn’t mention hail. I wondered what that would sound like in a trailer. I’d made the mistake of running through the yard collecting hailstones with a metal trash can lid on my head once. It was deafening.

While they said their good-byes, I stood on their wobbly, unanchored metal steps looking down the dirt street. The road ended at my house, its faded white siding and green trim gradually becoming silhouetted as the sun rolled itself behind the leafy green elms of my back yard.

I felt a little sad for Helen and Eck as they crushed their cigarettes out in the gravel of their driveway. They wouldn’t ever be able to comfortably plop down on these grate-like things and have a smoke. We had a concrete stoop. It solidly anchored my butt as it cooled in the summer shade of evening. I loved it just as much on chilly days when the sun did its best to heat it up.

A south breeze, just strong enough to keep the mosquitoes off, was calling up a few goose pimples on my bare legs now. I studied the trailer windows. They were small, sealed up tight, with little cranks on the inside. I planned to open my bedroom windows wide when I got home.

It would take the strength of both arms to raise my heavy wooden sash. I’d push it as high as I could. I loved the earth’s own AC rushing over my face, blanketing the quilt-wrapped cocoon of my body. Overnight my lungs would be refreshed; my senses would get their rest. I would awake again tomorrow to the chirp of swallows, smelling coffee and cigarettes.  

– CL Prater