Besides the eccentric residents in the trailer park.there was a definite darker element as well. The family that lived on the corner down from us had two daughters about my age who were abused. Their mother was a drug addict who lived in the trailer with her mom, the girls and a couple of vicious dogs. The rumor was that those dogs had bit a thief's leg clean off, and ate it. That was probably not true but they looked capable so we would give them wide berth.
When the mother went out to party she would leave the girls home unsupervised. The girls both swore, smoked and drank by the time I met them when they were six and eight years old. When their grandmother moved out their mother had a string of different rough looking boyfriends who would live there. The girls started having black eyes and bruises all over their bodies. Which the other kids noticed and teased them about.
One time the eight-year-old girl told us that she and her sister had dog collars put on and then chained to the wall in the living room. They said it was so they would not go anywhere while there mom went to a party. In the strange horrific naiveté of youth we thought the image of being chained up like a dog was about the funniest thing that we had ever heard. We teased the younger sister about it any time we saw her and call her 'Sonya the dog'. We also come up with pranks to play on those girls like mixing mud water in a cup and trying to get them to drink it by telling them it was hot chocolate.
The girls were taken into foster care later that year and I have no idea what happened to them after that.
I don't know when the horror of the situation became clear in my mind. Now thinking about there situation and how we piled on makes me physically sick and sad. It makes me wonder why no one was doing anything about it.
