Another month goes by here in Alamosa, CO, and I begin to see the similarities with home now. We both have red ants, drivers still think all roads belong to them, and the mosquitoes will coat your windshield with their innards if you haul tail down the road.

But the differences really stand out now that the rose-colored glasses are off. The nip in the air in the morning, the rain that lasts for five minutes and doesn’t quite get the ground wet (still called a downpour up here), and the overabundance of mobile homes really make this place different from home.

The mobile homes here really stand out. It’s like the manufactured-housing museum was located on several hundred different properties all over the valley floor, each with a different era of housing style, all at different levels of decomposition.

Added to that, the railroad seems to have given away obsolete rail cars and everyone uses them for storage on their property, so the valley here really resembles Livingston Parish. Well, without the Waffle Houses and meth labs. Or Home Depot, Bass Pro Shops, interstates, four-lane roads, trees, and inbred yokels. Or sweet tea and crawfish. But other than that, the similarities are striking.

What really makes me smile, and what Livingston Parish needs to take note of, is the booming construction market. In LP, they will put a mobile home out front for years as they build a normal house.

Makes sense, but what do you do with the trailer when you are done? Chunk it to the back of the property, using it for a meth lab or playhouse, until the roof collapses and it decomposes (or is blown into someone else’s yard during a hurricane)?

Not here, folks. The valley has scores of people who decided just to add on to their trailers. Second floors, extra rooms, and garages all seem to be the cool thing to do here.

Every day on the way to work, I watch the neighbors put a new roof on their manufactured house, adding a sunroom. The big bay windows can’t seem to hide the aluminum siding just inside. The porch still can’t hide the wheels underneath.

The trailers that someone joined with a small building in between look like one, continuous, stick-built house, but we can all see the trailers. It now looks like a compound that the FBI should be surrounding as you hole up in it with your arsenal.

But the most confusing are the second-floor additions. Two-story houses look really nice, as long as the first floor isn’t being supported by wheels.

There are at least three houses that still have the aluminum siding from the mobile home on the outside, with new wood on the second floor. It would be one thing if, like Grand Isle, they had a second trailer up on pylons above the first one, but no, it is all new construction upstairs.

I am having enough fun at the bank trying to get a construction loan for a log cabin on my property; I can just imagine the fun of trying to get a loan to add a second level to a house that can move if you need it to. My only guess is that, when the repo man comes to haul your house off in the middle of the night, his Hemi might not be enough to pull that elephant on top of the trailer, not to mention it won’t clear the telephone poles. I guess that might be enough to make anyone with a few dollars and a hammer add on to a pre-fab housing structure.

Or maybe, just maybe, that flowery, vinyl laminate floor or plastic paneling is hard to find at the Home Depot, and you must have it in your next dwelling, so you build your new house around it. Or maybe you still get taxed at mobile-home rates, even though a 2500-square-foot house ate the mobile home. I don’t know.

All I know is, between the plethora of mobile homes, mullets, Mohawks, and gun-toting pickup trucks, all I need is an RC Cola and a MoonPie to remind me of the bastard stepchild of Baton Rouge, good old Livingston Parish.