LAVONIA — The summer flowers called me back to the Beaver Creek Mobile Home Community.

I returned on a Saturday morning, just a week after I had initially visited and written about the place where a man was charged with imprisoning and abusing his family inside a mobile home for three years.

During that first visit, I had seen the trailer where the nightmare took place. Mobile home No. 268. Driving away, I also had seen flowers — bright and colorful — growing out of the ground on the living-room end of another mobile home.

I did not write about those flowers, and they nagged at me. “Hey, didn’t you see us? Why didn’t you write about us? We are beautiful. We are not like everything else you saw around here.”

What I saw, and what I wrote about, was the barren, sun-baked hill where the trailer park is situated. The treeless landscape. The hard, red clay — daring grass to grow. One hundred gray and white mobile homes set up line by line, side by side. What I saw, and wrote about, was a place where life was bound to be hard. Where people surely hung on tooth and nail to some semblance of living.

The flowers did not work into my story, but they would not be dismissed so lightly.

Who, I kept wondering, planted them? Watered them? Watched them grow?

So I went in search of that person.

She was not happy with me. Didn’t like what I had written about Beaver Creek. Not one darn bit. We talked briefly. She, standing by a small truck. Me, sitting in my car.

She wanted to know: What was I thinking?

I was thinking about that man and that family in trailer 268.

Well, that isn’t all there is to it. There are good people living around here.

Will you tell me about those people? About yourself?

Let me think about it.

Several days later, I returned for a third time to Beaver Creek. I sat in a mobile home with the flower lady and a friend of hers. I wanted to know about their lives. I wanted to know what life was like here. I wanted to write a series of stories that might challenge the prevailing notion that people who live in places like this are “trailer trash.”

We talked for an hour. We even laughed a little bit. But in the end, I knew there would be no series of stories about life in Beaver Creek. About what has led people here. About jobs. Getting by. Coming up with the month’s rent. A little girl’s kindergarten award framed on the wall of a trailer. Kids who love riding their bikes around the place. The flowers.

“It won’t make any difference,” one of the women said. “You know, people that live in mansions, in a house on a hill, they don’t need to be looking down at us. They got no idea what it’s like to be humbled.”

Salley M. McInerney can be reached by emailing salley@hartcom.net.