Remember last week when I said that to live the life that you want for yourself, your mindset has to line up with where you are trying to go and how this week I’d talk a little about what I believe is the number one way to make sure that is the case?
Well, I couldn’t decide on just one, so I’m going with three instead. Here they are…
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When we were in Arizona last year, there was a salty old man who lived in our RV park. His ramshackle 1988 Fleetwood Southwind RV was decorated in the usual way- blue tarp, duct tape trim, and the ever-present pile of cracked cinderblocks and firewood with a few broken lawn ornaments mixed in.
This guy- let’s call him Gus (his name is definitely not Gus, but I like “Gus” so we’re going with it)- is unimpressed. With everything.
He is unimpressed with the famous Tucson sunsets (“I’ve lived here all my life- they’re the same as they’ve always been.”).
He is unimpressed with the way things bloom after a desert rain (“Yup. It’s what happens.”).
And he is super unimpressed with the entire concept of “tiny house living.”
“Tiny house? On wheels? Yeah. Some of us have been doing that for years- it’s called a trailer, dipshit. The same rich kids who look down their noses at a trailer park, build their trailer out of expensive wood and take away the TV, and they think they’ve fucking invented sliced bread. Smug assholes.”
It was a pretty hilarious conversation.
Also, he kinda has a point.
The thing is, so do those “rich kids” who build those tiny homes, who spend time and effort to craft something sustainable and special, with intention and purpose (and who, just because it really does bear repeating yet again, are definitely NOT all “rich”).
They are simply looking at the same concept from two very different perspectives….
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Mr. Hussman was my 11th grade history teacher.
His first name was Benedict.
He had very dark hair and very pale skin and glasses that made his eyes look a little buggy.
He'd once been well on his way to becoming a priest when he mysteriously left seminary to teach high school history in the suburb of Chicago I’d recently moved to. I’ll bet there’s a helluva story there, but alas, I was entirely too preoccupied with my 17-year-old melodramas to dig for it. And ol’ Ben was good with boundaries, so I likely wouldn’t have been able to pry it out of him anyway (I was definitely not allowed to call him Ben…as a matter of fact, it still feels super weird even to write it, so "Mr. Hussman" he stays)…
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I was eighteen years old and sleeping on the couch of the dingy apartment I shared with Naomi, John, and Brad.
I didn’t have a bedroom of my own, so my nights were often disrupted by the comings and going of my roommates. Naomi’s late hours arriving home from her job at The Wild Zebra “Gentlemen’s Club” that our apartment shared a parking lot with. John’s drunken rages at Naomi, fueled by convenience store malt liquor, jealousy, and impotence. Good nights meant broken dishes and bad ones meant broken bones and another trip to a new emergency room with a sobbing Naomi defending his latest outburst. Brad was a quieter presence, eyes sleepy from whatever he’d smoked and occasionally even interested in a book I was reading. He’s a background player in my memories of that time, shadowy and indistinct…
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I think I’ve mentioned that part of why Justin and I are in Seattle for the year is to help my Dad do some big renovations on his home here. After doing some quick cosmetic updates on the bedrooms, our first big project is a bathroom gut job. And I mean gut job- we spent nearly 10 hours bashing out drywall and tile and took this baby right down to the studs. It was a blast…
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We drove north, looking for the quiet places in between.
We drove north, sometimes turned back by wildfire, or rockslide, or the suggestion from a roadside stranger of something not to be missed.
We drove north, unfurling that space within us that sometimes gets cramped, sometimes grows small under the pressures of paychecks and laundry and getting the dishes done….
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Have you ever come back from traveling somewhere and thought, “Was I really just in Bermuda/Nepal/ California/wherever or was it all just a glorious dream?”
It’s a feeling that has become so familiar to us over these last years of travel. Each time we settle into a new place, the last one feels like perhaps it was all just a lovely dream…
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We are closing in on the end of another year and I have found myself thinking more and more about what’s next for us, where we go from here (both figuratively and literally…our time in Alaska ends December 29th!).
We’ve been talking a lot about home lately.
Again. (When you move every three months, this is a topic that comes up often.)
We’ve been asking ourselves if we want to keep traveling as we have been or if we want to begin the process of really figuring out what we want next in our lives. Where we want next in our lives…
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We walked in sub-freezing temperatures across a rocky and snow covered landscape to reach the base of a massive wall of ice. We walked inside that wall and stood in awe of its power, touched the prehistoric stones caught in the ice, looked warily at the cracks in the turquoise ice creating a spiderweb over our heads….
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So often, when we remember the magical moments of our childhoods, those memories are doused in golden summer light. Long days and sunburned noses and the smell of cut grass and hot asphalt and maybe the feel of popsicle melting down our hands. We remember heat shimmering off of cracked sidewalks and drinking tepid water from garden hoses and hair that felt crunchy with salt water.
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When I was in college, I fell in love with the movie Sabrina, first with the 1995 remake starring Julia Ormond and Harrison Ford, and then with the Audrey Hepburn original. I watched them both repeatedly and for a time could quote them with ease…
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“Hey Cindy! Dinner’s ready! Do you want to eat at the table or do you need to eat at your desk again?"
It was November of 2014 and I was a week out from shooting my last wedding of the season. It was the first year that my business broke six figures and everything was finally falling into place. Except that it wasn’t…
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Justin and Geoff had gone on a long run/hike for the day, leaving my introverted self some much needed alone time. I headed out with my journal and my camera and a dog-eared copy of a book I was reading for the fourth time, no specific destination in mind…
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We have landed, officially.
After a crappy hiccup last week that left us scrambling to find a place to live very last minute (it was a total mess, you guys, but all is well now), we got into a short-term rental on Saturday and Justin began his new contract here on Monday. I think it’s only been in the last 24 hours that I have been able to take a deep breath and look around me, begin to think past the immediate, to get some sense of our life here for the next three months…
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You guys.
I have so much to share, so much to say. I can’t wait. But today is just for a few announcements and updates, so bear with me…
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We are talking when Justin halts mid-sentence for a moment and then says it’s stopped raining, pointing at the roof of the truck cap. I pause and listen. Sure enough, the drilling of raindrops that has been ever present since last night has stopped. We smile at each other and I turn to wipe the film of condensation from the window closest to me and peer out. I start laughing.
“That’s because it’s snowing instead!”
We open the back window wide and look out at a world turning white before our very eyes…
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We reached Alaska last night.
It was raining and grey as we passed through customs at the border and we pulled over not too long after to boil water for tea and make something warm to eat under the watchful eyes of the boreal forest. We pulled into the Fairbanks Walmart parking lot in the 10pm gloaming and rolled into the back of the truck, falling asleep to the sounds of city life.
Our journey so far has been marked by long days of driving since leaving Seattle ten days ago and life has been a whirlwind since leaving California. But we expected this, planned for it, braced for it. We set our sights on the Brooks Range before it froze solid and knew we’d have to fly past places we yearned to stop if we wanted to make it in time.
There have been the hiccups of any good adventure…
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