A 4×10 Existence

Guest Post!

(And by ‘guest’, I mean ‘Rebecca’, who is in almost no sense a guest. This is her first *ever* blog post. You heard it here on Tisdel’s Tirades People of the Road, folks.

Today, June 1st 2017, is my 5-year Nolaversary. Five years to the day after I drove into New Orleans, I drove out. It’s the day that I no longer call New Orleans home.

We made it about seven feet before one of the Mo’s [Andy’s note: all our dashboard cacti are named some variety of “Mo”] had an accident. (They get carsick easily.)

My home now, at least for the next 2 1/2 months, is a 2012 Volkswagen Golf named Vivian. My co-pilot Andy and I have packed what we think we’ll need to travel 10,000 miles across the continental United States (and some of Canada). A new home awaits us in Cambridge, MA, but that’s a much later blog post.

Moving is an interesting experience, and I’m speaking of the figurative sense of changing houses, rather than the literal moving that we are doing at the moment on Interstate 10. In moving, it’s imperative that one looks at all the things that have accumulated in the house. Things that one didn’t necessarily decide to accumulate, but that end up filling the nooks and shelves of the entire space they’re given, like a gas.

Now multiply that by two. When Andy moved into my apartment, just about 6 months ago, he had a whole apartment’s worth of stuff already. Never have I wanted to be a minimalist more than sorting through all the junk to pack, to throw out, to give away or sell, to take with us.

And it’s now been sorted and pared down into the bare minimum that will fit in the car. It still seems like a lot.

Andy and I together have a combined 53 years of life under our belts. Although we haven’t been accumulating for that long, it’s still disconcerting to see roughly 1/600th of the stuff we had before as the stuff we decided to keep with us on this journey. Perhaps we’ll be ready for that dream Tiny House after this.

-Rebecca