I’m supposed to be concentrating.

I’m supposed to be focusing on all things writing.

But—I can’t. I can’t stop thinking about my next stop as part of my family’s “No Home Hobo Summer Adventure.” We sold our family home at the beginning of July. Signed on the solid line and POOF it’s someone else’s now. I have to admit it is strange thinking of how the place I called home for the last fifteen years, where I and my husband welcome four babies and watched them grow is not our place anymore. It’s weird knowing I can’t just walk in the front door to use the bathroom or walk through the gardens I built from the roots up. I can’t walk around my garden—their garden—deadheading flowers and picking ripe berries. Some things will always feel like ours even when they aren’t anymore.

None of that is ours anymore. It’s a bit strange.

What may be even stranger is that I, my husband and our four children have no home right now. We are—shall we say—between homes and yet we refer to our old home and our new home as “our” homes even though, technically, neither actually belongs to us at the moment. It has been a bit nutty for our family of six to leap without a lily pad to land on. However, I suppose we can’t overthink too many things or we’d never do anything. We outgrew our house and so we sold it.

Sometimes one thing at a time is all human beings can (or should) do. So, that’s what we did. We have been trying to just focus on the next thing and do that. Luckily a lily pad appeared just as we took our foot off the last one. What a miracle that was. Divine intervention perhaps! There’s just one problem. We have to find somewhere to set our twelve feet between now and October. A minor inconvenience.

So, instead of freaking out about not actually having a home at the moment, we decided to capitalize on the fact that it’s summer and things are already a bit loosey-goosey by nature. Why not make all this no-home-ness feel intentional. The first thing we needed to come up with was a marketing campaign of sorts to assure our kids this was all part of “the plan” and—of paramount importance to them—very fun!

And so the Traveling Hobo Circus was born. Thanks to a few good friends, relatives, and neighbors we began hitting the road like any respectable group of hobos immediately. First we invaded our realtors’ home only three doors down from our “old” house. It was like something out of a comedy sketch when we made our exit barely in time for the new owners to perform their “walk through” giving them a wave, getting in our car only to drive three doors down and get out again where we were graciously invited to swim in their pool, work with use of their wi-fi, eat, drink and overall—be a  quite merry band of hobos.  

We know we have way too much stuff to qualify as legit hobos but we are indeed traveling and working. We have set up our modern-day Hobo Circus Camp with way more than tidy bindles trailing us in five different locations since July 9th and tomorrow we head out for a sixth destination and then Monday we go to our seventh and final Hobo Camp until we return at the end of the summer.

The kids are definitely getting a summer they will not soon forget. I will be content to be in one place, and hopefully find my calendar that went missing in May, once we are able to settle down in our new home in the fall. Until then—look for us traveling around this summer and if any of us seem a little scattered, it’s because—quite literally—we are.

Here’s to embracing your inner hobo and just going where the wind blows you for a while.

Enjoy your summer travels wherever they may take you and if they take you nowhere, well—I can’t say that sounds too bad to me right now.