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.