Not from the inside, unfortunately, but I got to see BM's house and family colony for the first time today. Usually if I am in the car when SS is brought home she meets us at the end of the road, but today she said just to come on up and drop him off at her Mom's house. So we trek up the little dirt road up their mountain and pass by BM's house. From the outside, it's not actually that bad. The yard was taken care of for the most part - no landscaping or anything but at least she had grass. My only major complaint about the outside of her house is that she throws all their aluminum cans out in the driveway and crushes them with the car then occasionally picks them up and takes them to the recycling center, so there are a bunch of Coke cans lying everywhere. I told BF if the inside of her house looks as good as the outside, it couldn't be all that bad. He said no, don't let the outside deceive you...he said, picture garbage - not just junk, but garbage - piled halfway up to your shins all over the place, with paths worn through from room to room, and that's the inside of the house.

As good (well, not good, but at least decent) as the outside of BM's little log cabin on the mountain looked, the rest of the family colony was exponentially worse. Just around the bend are three more houses where the rest of the family lives (literally about 1/8 of a mile away, but she still drives her car there and back), and it is honestly more appalachian and backwoods than any houses I have ever personally seen - and I live in the mountains of Tennessee. Look at this picture that I found on the internet, it's the closest I can find to depicting what they live like. Now remove the grass and picture the house encircled at about 15 feet out by a short horse fence, inside which two horses make themselves home (the horses could literally walk up on the front porch if they wanted to). You have to climb the horse fence and walk through their tiny little pasture (no grass, just mud and manure) to get to the house - so I'm sure there's all kinds of nice bugs and germs being trekked in from the manure outside. They live on 100 acres, so why they have two horses in their front yard is completely beyond my comprehension. All around the houses are stacks of wooden pallets and rotting wooden boards. There is a chicken wire corral where about a year's worth of aliminum cans are stored, waiting to be taken to the recycling center for Christmas money. There is garbage everywhere - plastic containers, boxes, plastic bags, and of course, more aluminum cans. I saw about a dozen cats, all wild, all skinny and looking like they either never got fed or had really bad parasites (probably a little of both). The houses have been built by the family - BM's is a log cabin, both floors adding up to about 1,000 square feet total (not shabby but not great). One is a cinder block house, one is a 600 square foot 100+ year old log cabin that is currently uninhabited and is used for storage; and then there's BM's parents' house, which kind of resembles a shanty house that you would see in the middle east.

I was completely taken aback. I didn't know that people lived that way. It is so completely outside of anything that I have ever experienced or witnessed. I can't imagine living there and being happy about it or proud of it. I can't imagine living there period. I certainly understand why BF could never be proud of living there or want to continue living there. I asked him, you must have known when you started dating BM that this is where she lived and would continue to live? He said what he saw was young, intelligent woman with two college degrees, making about $30K a year, which to him resembled an ambitious and motivated woman. When they met, she was living with her parents, he didn't know that she was going to buy the next house over and settle down in the family colony to stay forever. He said he didn't know that at that point, she had already accomplished everything she ever aspired to do, or that her dream was to live up on her family's little mountain with her husband for the rest of her life.

When we got home after being gone for a week, then seeing that little colony of garbage, I was SO proud of my home. We pulled up to our pretty, well-manicured yard, and I took in our landscaping and our beautiful yet modest home and breathed a huge sigh of contentedness and relief. I just can't believe that anyone in their right mind could look at that mess, then look at our home and think that SS is better off living there instead of here. I feel so sorry for SS and all of his cousins who live there and are being raised to believe that this is a normal and good way to live. I hate it that SS is surrounded by garbage and horse shit, and that that to him is just how it is. Having something to compare it to (being our house), I see why he is ashamed of where he lives. I would be too.