personal journeys

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 much 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.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

When I set Mom’s ashes into the grave last week, all that was left of her was a granite urn weighing 20.8 pounds. She had been downsizing since the mid-eighties, and she arrived at the Pearly Gates completely used up and emptyhanded. Her children will not be arguing over the holiday dishes or her teeth. There is no estate to settle.

Mom is my hero.

As the detachment of my current possessions becomes more psychologically sophisticated, I notice that everything at Home Base is in my way. Today my dinner, briefly perched upon one of many piles, marked its territory by slaloming into credit card bills, my Zack Rabbit, a ball of rubber bands and some origami instructions. Creamed spinach from Boston Market lost its appeal pretty quickly, and after trashing all but the Zack Rabbit (by Zack Giffin, skier, and tiny-houser extraordinaire) I was happy for dinner to be a spoonful of Skippy right out of the jar. In the blink of an eye, several decisions were made for me, and I believe this new tiny house I end up with will truly be just another step in a journey I have been on for a very long time…..long enough for me to have hoarded an article from a Worth magazine from September of 1995 when this journey was called Downshifting. You can’t even find a stick shift anymore these days, so the term, if not the magazine article, was discarded.

And so, without ever realizing it, I have become my mother.

The Trouble With Transience

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The day after I returned from my August Tiny House Adventure, my mother died. She had dementia and forgot to keep breathing. So I find myself reflecting upon her life, and comparing it to mine.

Mom and Dad retired early to live on the road in an RV. They brought his mother along for the ride. When Grammy Gun(hild) died in Florida, her body was transported by train to PA for burial. She was 92.

Living on the road came to a halt when Dad also died in Florida. His cremains were strapped under the sink of the motor home – because, Mom explained, the oven was just too morbid. In a comedy of errors that could have only been orchestrated by him, it was discovered that he had been buried in a neighbor’s plot only after the burial marker was installed several months later. It happens. Up he came.

Twenty years passed. Mom spent most of that time back in Lowell on Death Row, a street with an inordinate number of funeral “pahhluhs” near the church where she had received all of her sacraments. She worked next door at the Merrimack River Valley House until becomimg a resident there. As her mental faculties faded, a series of moves ended at the facility where she died this week.

And here comes the complicated part. Her ashes are in Massachusetts. The plot is in Pennsylvania. She resided in both states as well as others; not one right after the other, but concurrently. That doubles the luncheons, the black suits, the priests, the services, and of course the death notices. It doubles the hotel expense and the gas and the meals and the tension. The one thing I know about living on the road is that the people you meet are almost entirely wonderful committed people who hold new relationships dear. In the campgrounds and state parks and rest areas, the lakes, the gas stations and the Walmart parking lots, a huge expansive community exists from sea to sea.

And that’s about how big her heart was.

Waterfront Property

July’s Tiny Estates adventure taught me one thing right off the bat. Ducks have this composting toilet idea down pat. Yes. The grass is always greener. Whereas June provided the comfort of evening bull frogs singing lullabies, July was a month for watching your step.

Still, the view was gorgeous, day and night. With unseasonably warm temperatures that week, it was sometimes possible to avoid the actual outdoors and finally get some work done. This was the first unit that offered a table, and I took full advantage. With my seven pound printer/scanner on the counter, laptop on the table, bra draped over the handle of the front door, and shades wide open, I set about condensing the most pressing paper categories on my agenda. Using the seating area in the entertainment area for casual review before recycling, and refusing to carry any paperwork to the loft bed or bathroom, I stayed on task for the first time since this series of journeys began.

For a quick refresher, this is my fourth Tiny Estates unit and seventh tiny adventure since April 3. I have also done a similar test in New England, but that was some time ago, and I didn’t even see a single true tiny house on the whole trip. I did learn, though, to bring a dish basin for shoe washing at the front door. If I had taken time to do a little fishing this trip, I would absolutely have needed it in this unit.

On another note, this is the first unit where my elbow hit the ceiling in the loft bedroom while rearranging the covers. It was also the first wit a bedside lightswitch, so ya gotta take the good with the bad in all things, I see. All four Tiny Estates units so far have had barn door style bathroom doors. This was the first unit that prevented the use of the refrigerator in the open door position. I am an architect’s daughter and this might not have been obvious to others. I am also a grazing eater, and this took all week to remember.

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As for the Carbon Footprint, a unit like this which is wider by a sneaker length on each side, provides more elbow room than you’d think. The extra width was most noticible by the fact that there was room for an aisle down the middle of it instead of along one wall. imag0141 I found this arrangement in the center of the unit to be espescially useful for my purposes. If it were my unit, the loft here would be for storage, and not a spare bedroom. Then I could keep some of my paperwork as a momento of my former life!

Blue Genes and Other Conspiracy Theories

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Others call it Playing the Hand You’re Dealt, and I am holding a Full Haus. Full from basement to attic, side to side, front to back. No matter how the cards are shuffled, the process of playing those cards will take me on through to my little urn in the ground, however long that takes.

It starts with genetics. For me, and others around me, the Baby Blues started when I was a toddler. Full-blown depression hit me in my teens. Panic disorder joined in. I was both blessed and cursed with a critical eye and a serious orientation, even as I became known for my dry wit and tendency toward humorous expression of ordinary events. I was also most likely given DNA which prevented me from acquiring that subtle trait called Organized. I have never gotten to the end of a calendar or list or agenda without a detour of some sort, so I should have expected my new lifestyle to take detours as well.

But no. The absurd complications that have been arising from my journey from a Full Haus to a Tiny House are keeping me awake at night. Just as I dive in, the lake freezes over and I land with a splat. And the ice skates were finally donated just last week.

The plan, after taking into account the limitations of income and legal expenses, was to obtain a very large pocketbook and tow it behind me. Never again would I concern myself with forgetting the grocery list or wishing I had worn different shoes. It got complicated immediately.

First, it needed to be a part-time endeavor, beginning in April. Three of the first five adventures were simple hotel rooms with a micro-fridge. Generally the rest are resort-style units on wheels in a former campground serendipitously created at the exact time that I started looking. The towels are plush and the appliances are new. Each unit has something I will decide to keep for my own design and something else I will discard as unworkable.

Once the concept formed, the clutter issue had to be addressed. For better or worse, I started with paper. Digitizing all the paper in my home was a ridiculous concept, so when the new printer/scanner and laptop combo didn’t work appropriately, there was still plenty to shred or recycle directly. A good deal of paper clutter was actually created in the first few weeks that the devices failed to meet their sales pitch descriptions. One such scrap contained the Golden Ticket to allow for a refund. Toss in low back pain and a cranky ignition and I was soon wondering if I was ever going to be able to pat myself on the back.

As June approaches and five units have been explored, I find myself joyfully pushing that rock up the hill in spite of everything conspiring to make it more difficult than expected. Unstable Internet. Rain. GPS errors. Mud. Wrinkled clothes. Broken plastic silverware. Squirrels. Rude restaurant servers. Long lines. Ripped grocery bags. Split seams. Melted ice cream. Can openers for righties only. Pills. No cell towers. All first world problems, to be sure.

So deal again, Mr. Karma. I will ace this.

April’s Fool Goes on the Road

April marked the beginning of my part time tiny house lifestyle, and it was not smooth sailing, let’s just get that much out of the way. Trip Number One, to a small motel room in Amish Country, started two days late because of a delay in the delivery of a traveling scanner. April Fools Day probably wasn’t the wisest day to start a new life anyway. –

Lesson one: Be flexible.

Lesson Two: Expect your navigation device to get restless and fall asleep. A human, you can whack on the shoulder. When you’re driving alone, you’re stuck pulling over onto the shoulder just to make sure your device hasn’t lost interest in assisting you. Then you have to wait for a red sports car to cut over into the passing lane so you can actually get back on your journey.

Lesson Three: Do not pack more than your back can carry, and once packed, make sure your Stuff can’t slide around in transit. Twelve banker boxes full of paper sit quietly behind me going west. Eight banker boxes are far less cooperative going back east.

Lesson Four: Find a way to get your emails every day. Even a three-year perfect payment history will not protect you from losing your cell service while you sit at the side of the road trying to call AAA.

Lesson Five: Never assume that you can leave your Stuff in the vehicle until your next trip. Your son might get a job and need to haul his sofa to a new apartment.

Lesson Six: Plan for a lot of sitting. When traffic is slow, I have learned to blow bubbles out the window. For an extra advantage, the inevitable spilled soap is great for coffee dribbles. Keep water nearby for these laundry issues, as well as for thirst and medication. The smaller the bottle, the less likely you are to bump into the ceiling to get to the bottom of it.

The Biggest Lesson: Laugh. Whatever goes wrong will teach you something about yourself or the world around you. Sometimes both.