Hello, everyone. I hope you’re enjoying your summer. If not, this should help.
You may know that we sold our home on Lake Champlain to move to Thailand this winter, but in the meantime, we moved into a minuscule three-season Adirondack camp. Here’s an update.
The move was harsh. It fortunately didn’t give us time to think about the wisdom of our choices. But once we trimmed down two lifetimes’ worth of belongings to the inside of six hundred square feet, we were left with plenty of time to think. This is what I learned:
- Tiny living seems to be an acquired taste, and we haven’t developed it yet. Beware to those of you who lust over tidy cozy cabins built inside a shed: They’re far less tidy once filled with socks, pots, and dog toys. And people crawling over each other.
- You must really like each other to coexist in less space than most American living rooms.
- Pacing by to the bathroom door takes some getting used to. So does driving 20 miles to do the laundry, eating down the cans of Progresso and wondering what to do with the garbage.
But it’s not all bad. There’s less cleaning, it’s easier to find your stuff, and mowing is no longer an issue, since we don’t have a lawn. We can skip downloading the dishwasher, since we don’t have one, and being neighborly. We don’t have those either.
Getting over the rough moments required lots of patience and wine. When the patience ran thin and wine ran out, I went for broke: I took us camping.
That helped. If you think living in a home with a roof, a bathroom and a kitchen is harsh, think again. Our 22 feet RV can barely fit two adults, let alone a German Shepherd suffering from the zoomies.
But there’s something special about RVs, even tiny. Even more so when everyone else is in a tent, and it’s raining. Crawling over each other to the bathroom feels like intimacy, jumping over the dog to is functional fitness, opportunity, and lumbering to the showers by flashlight is an adventure.
The best part was coming home, where we can all stand at the same time, we occasionally lose sight of each other, and I can turn on the light at 3 AM instead of working in the dark. How cool is that?
But the days grow shorter and the leaves start turning, reminding us that winter is coming, and we need to move out before November. Where? Who knows? Isn’t life an adventure?
How’s your summer?