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Eenie Meenie Tiny Tow

If you can follow the story in this little picture book, I can get a degree in psychology. Here’s where the journey started:

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No, actually. It started before the vernal equinox in Valley Forge, honoring the nomadic life of my father during his retirement with Mom. It started when I visited Mom and Dad’s motor home at the curb.

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Actually, it was even before that, when we had a VW Camper while we were growing up.

green and white volkswagen combi — Photo by Skitterphoto on Pexels.com

You get the idea. Living on wheels is in my blood. That being said, I spent over thirty years raising three boys in my forever-nest, which my mother-in-law called “a fine starter home” when it was built. I thought it was huge.

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Eventually it got too small to share with my now former husband. Financial considerations forced me to reconsider the itinerant life, which I had attempted in New Hampshire and it was fun. My first blog posts are about that. This newer journey has been more serious – and funny – than the earlier one.

The first and last tiny experiences for the year were hotel rooms with a micro-fridge. Somehow the freezer space in April was much larger than the one in December… Neither experience was anything to write home about. There were three additional hotel stays in 2018, all with microwaves and refrigerators. Again, nothing to write home about. There were a few options I avoided: The Yurt, The Cottage, The LEGO, a Relaxed Shack and Cinderella’s Coach. The yurt was so small that I ate it.

There were a total of eight Tiny Estate THOWs I stayed in, each for seven nights. In order, they are:

The Journey (April), The Eagle (May), The Low Country (June), The Chairman (July), The Vision (August), The Prairie Drifter (September), The Capital (October) and The Moonlight (November). Each had features I knew belonged in my own design, and at least one feature that I could not live with. On the whole, I learned that the lifestyle would work for me, provided I tweaked it a little in some places and a lot in others. One month I forgot to pack my clothes. Another month I had no patience for the induction burners. Once I couldn’t get water to run in the shower. Another time I couldn’t get to the loft. One place had trouble getting internet. Another month there was too much duck poop. But it was never so bad as the first visit, when it was just me and Cody and 14 acres of cold bright moon glow and no shades in the windows.

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But that’s a story for the other blog, fairy-fizz.com

Pracktical Magick

aerial photography of brown house on body of water beside powerboat — Photo by Ibrahim Asad on Pexels.com

No man is an island unto himself.

Even an empty nester needs a community; a tree or a branch or a rafter. Sometimes even a gilded cage.

When last we met, I was in one of my quandaries. Was I willing to give up my Stuff on an accelerated timeline in order to ensure a spot in a particular location?

Spoiler alert: sort of.

The dilemmas crept up on me and despite analyzing them one by one, what it boiled down to was a question of size. A tiny house, by most definitions, is under 400 square feet. If you have your own plot of land it can be a 20 by 20 garage. Generally speaking, with a wide load permit it might be 10 by 40. That was my dream for my circumstances, allowing me to live within my means without giving away all my hidden treasures.

Most of my items are in fact hidden, in 2000 square feet, because the house is full of things that were functionally necessary for raising three children who have now fled the nest and become capable adult humanoids on their own. They cannot be blamed for much of the clutter, since they brought most of it with them to their own nests. I lent my vehicle to all three of them this year to move from one nest to another.

The Forever Home in my head – and on graph paper – contained a hundred square feet of hidden storage for items I wanted to use on occasion but not daily….costumes, crock pot, sewing machine, sleeping bag, spare stationery, toilet paper, jewelry, mittens, sandals, shovel….all organized for easy access and quick return. If you love something, it needs a home, too.

When I was blindsided with the news that Tiny Estates could only handle a 28 foot unit, I was stumped. Could I risk losing the spot by waiting for a larger lot, or should I get something too small for me, be assured of the larger spot when one opened up, and be stuck with an extra house in a few years?

The Stepping Stone is in the design stages right now.

Getting Lost

Because there is something magical about the prospect of starting over, there is also something very sobering about losing that magic to a series of realities.

So far this year, I have been to two Tiny House Expos and spent up to a week in eleven different tiny options, eight of which have been at Tiny Estates. Most of the education has been about me, not my dreams. Now it’s time prepare for the final exam, and I’m having that nightmare where I don’t remember ever going to class. It’s time to sh*t or get off the Luggable Loo.

What I know so far is that I’m still a work in progress. My dreams and my reality weave a story of slow progress. I do not “turn over a new leaf” so much as toss it back into the air to watch if it lands somewhere else in the yard. I try on several coats before deciding which one keeps me warm in the winter without making me sweat in the grocery store. I sit in a chair and wonder about a new walking route I’m not taking. I always know that in the back of my head there is a better answer to a harder question.

I live.

And that means trying things that need tweaking, don’t work out, distract, confuse, annoy and exasperate. For this reason and a million others, I am re-evaluating the decision to go from a hoarded house to a tiny one.

Stay tuned.

You Can’t Make This Stuff Up

And you can’t sell it on eBay©.

All of the directions from my October Tiny Estates unit to the Tiny House Expo in Maryland took me directly through a town I had promised not to visit. More precisely, I had promised to try not to visit. So being a somewhat hip and modern woman, I took a poll on Facebook to get input from my friends, which resulted in a shocking number of morally conservative responses. None of them was interested in fuel conservation.

During my return trip – where I had 3% cell battery and no charging cord – Google Maps, in an apparent effort to conserve time and gas as well as cell phone battery, sent me directly through Heartbreaker’s hometown – on his wedding anniversary no less – to make a left onto … Memory Lane. I kid you not. I would have taken a screenshot right then and there, but my phone died.

By the time the week was over, I was back to business, catching an ordinary event on the odometer as I drove onto Route 283…. This is the highway that flooded last month, leaving me half convinced that a spy was attached to my tow hitch.

There is no room for clutter in my new life, and that includes the stuff in my head and on my devices. Coincidence is going to have to be nothing more than co↔incidence; two unrelated occurrences. Fate and Destiny are easily spotted in The Real World because they belong on the other side of the river with the witches and fairies. There are plenty of concrete issues with making a dream a reality without confusing the process with fantastical crossovers. There is little room for messing around with symbolic messages from nowhere.

Besides resolving the issue of which land I was parked in for October, another event happened for the first time. My sons visited. I suspect they were relieved to see that I was going to a real place every month, and that there was actually room for us all to sleep on real mattresses, eat real food and connect to real internet. Middle Son was even disappointed that there was no real tent. Sadly, between the four of us we couldn’t come up with a real lighter, and the s’mores were left for another occasion.

This unit was built by Spencer Sousa, and its delivery on September 1st made Tiny Estates the largest community of tiny houses on wheels in the world. It was the first unit available that was built with a metal frame. There were periodic glitches with the internet connection, but it otherwise shared the general features of the others. It’s called The Capital and named for Univest, one of many partners allowing this concept to come to fruition.

There have been so many surprises in my first year of converting my lifestyle. Heck, there have been surprises in all my years of living, period. You can plan for just a small percentage of them, but in the end you need to just go with the flow.

IF I had stayed on 83 beyond York after leaving the Expo, IF I had ignored the whispers, IF I had been traveling just a few days later, I might have been another fatality in an eleven vehicle pile-up, leaving all my worldly possessions strewn across the road, and not a shred of it would be useful to anybody.

Don’t make your dream a reality. Make your reality a reality. Dream your dreams.

A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Bank

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As I mentioned in my last entry on both blogs, I generally keep a clear division between my real life and my fantasy life, which is especially good because there is a complicated exchange rate between the two states. In Figment the currency is acorns. In Reality I have to use cash.

Now I acknowledge an increasingly fluid view of The Real World, but this part-time tiny house living is not exactly funded with acorns. I am waiting for my ship to come in, and it’s so late that I worry it’s at the bottom of the ocean somewhere, providing a sweet little home for a family of mermaids. Mermaids are water fairies, but they are rarely found in the middle of that river which separates the two worlds in which I live. And so I am currently living on Plastic, which is yet another example of a state which is both real and fantastical.

The practical basis for going tiny from hoarder/collector is financial. The dream home was a nightmare. The decisions and the duties were made by two very different people, and the children suffered for it, right along with the parents. Nobody knew mucrh about autism then, so I kept trying and he kept yelling. His vision for the house reminded me of some relatives on my side of the family who wouldn’t allow anyone in the living room. Ever. That’s not a “living” room in my opinion, and nobody will ever convince me that you aren’t supposed to LIVE in your house, even on the days when nobody rings the doorbell. The Queen is not going to visit. The place I have lived half my life became a great big storage bin, where both of us were just waiting for the other to move out. Three attorneys told me I couldn’t leave because I would be destitute. I got divorced anyway.

I will never ever have enough money to stay in the house. He will never ever have the physical ability to leave. By the end of the year both of our ships should dock, and all my decisions will be mine. I don’t want to live tiny. I want to live within my means. I will live in the largest Tiny allowed by definition. I will have room for some storage, but only for things I really love. I will have a toilet seat that will never be lifted, walls with no holes, a real bed, a table to eat at, all my cast iron and Godiva boxes. I will never cover the sofa in plastic or keep my good china on the top shelf. Heck, I won’t even have good china. I might not have a sofa. Best of all, I won’t have to pay storage fees for junk in the attic or basement or garage.

All that I don’t want to live with will be left on the opposite side of the river, where you fish on your side, I’ll fish on mine, and nobody fishes in the middle.*
* Lake Webster, disputed translation.

Of All the Towns in All the World

This never happened before. I don’t know if this story belongs in the reality blog or the fantasy blog. I keep them away from each other, just as I do in my life. Fairies actually don’t belong in tiny houses, and my pleasant life demands that they stay on their own side of the river. This week there was some trespassing going on behind my back, and the flooding only made it worse.

It seems my tiny house resort is built upon the playground of Beloved, the first recipient of the bubble rider fairies. I am not certain that I can park my tiny house on hallowed ground without stirring up a witchy potion that will burn a hole right through the cauldron.

Just this once, I will tell a story of both tiny houses and tiny sprites; of yesterday and tomorrow; of joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure.

And then we will sort the laundry.

Once upon a time, there was an old lady, a shriveled up, used up, washed up old woman who had accomplished all that she had set out to achieve long before her life was meant to be over. On her sixtieth birthday, she had been given a gift. She got her life back. Her own life. No longer her husband’s nursemaid nor her children’s cook, she was handed the task of holding her own life to her heart. To treasure. To honor. To elevate. To share.

If she was provided with the means to accomplish this task, it was not to be found in her purse. Creativity was an absolute necessity in this endeavor. If there would be tiny income, there would have to be tiny expenses. The castle would have to go. A lifelong camper, she had long ago learned to make do. She had also learned to squeeze every drop of usefulness out of a thing, be it an apple, a coat, or a pillowcase.

More often than not, it wasn’t a thing that was on hand but a thought. Like Uncle Sir Isaac inventing calculus so that physics could be explained, the old lady invented an alternate reality, with witches and moon dancers and gnomes. She called it Figment, after Uncle Fig, and she divided the two worlds with a river that was already running through the area anyway, knowing by now that life was too short to spend any of it arguing with Mother Nature.

The old lady started getting younger, and indeed her wrinkled old self began to fill out and fit around herself better. She was down to about 55 mph in Figment when the mud from the rains started getting into her engine. When the rains had stopped and the ground had dried, an assessment found uprooted trees and fallen eaves. Over at the village of tiny homes, the swing set had tipped over and an old grave was uncovered beneath it.

“Here Lies Beloved”,

the headstone read above smaller letters:

“worlds baldest viking”.

The cleanup went on from the Equinox until the Ice Moon. The Home Depot had run out of brooms for Halloween rides, lumber for Homecoming floats, and candles for Christmas displays.

But the New Year started with great hope and fireworks. Life on both sides of the river was just about perfect again.

I have elected to ignore the history of the Tiny Estates location and accept that everyone has a past. This is where I will both play solitaire and dance under the full moon. It is in Figment and it is not in Figment. Uncle Isaac probably explained it in The Principia.

Battening Down The Hatches

The ten and a half inches that fell on my route to Tiny Estates last week would have been in the neighborhood of ten FEET of snow in January. Neither snow nor rain could have been blamed on the first mistake with my trip, though. I left my clothes back home.

There was a perfectly reasonable explanation for this; I had to empty the van so that I could help my youngest son use it to move off campus. Having done the same in April for the middle child, I knew it was a managable change in plans. What I did not allow for was the fact that the clothes, in a large Rubbermaid bin, were in the garage instead of the main portion of the house. Most months, this Rubbermaid bin also acted as a work-table. It served absolutely no purpose in the garage at home.

I got much less work done on that front, but the design of my own tiny home moved closer to reality. As always, I learned even more with this new unit, both positive and … not so much. The Prairie Drifter was the first unit that had a true first floor bedroom, but it also had a smaller refrigerator. It had two loft bedrooms which I never used. It also had induction burners, which was a personal challenge. There were issues with the shower which ultimately left me assuming I was an idiot when no water came out at all. It was a water main break.

With less ability to work in the pattern I had been developing, I was free to entertain a friend from college and his teenaged son. After a few hours they were demanding a return visit. Even my own sons have not visited. That was nice.

This was also the week I left my keys and my bra hanging on the doorknob as always, and I went outside to comb my hair. Yep. As I jiggled down the road to get the spare key, the lawn maintenance people arrived, muttering “mucho muchas somethingorother.” Served me right. Once properly attired, including my Fitbit to measure the wasted steps, I returned to the office with yet another story for the records.

Clearly, I have made myself at home.