I Never Said I Wanted a Normal Life
A Trailer Tour, Two Chickens and a Song
Unless you end up dead or in jail,
living on the road means never running out of chances for a new start.
I seem to be a person who needs to start over. Over and over, I make wrong choices, I get discouraged, or pick up a bad habit. I let my exercise routine slide and start eating candy for dinner. Next, I’m watching Selling Sunset. Then it’s time for a new route. Toss the clutter on the dinette seats, shake out the rugs, clean the fridge, assess everything I own to see what I can get rid of, then hitch up and go.
Do something different.
Anything is possible.
And so, I’m ready for a fresh start this week, as we head south down the East Coast from New Hampshire to the South Carolina Low Country.
I’m always trying to resist
the urge to complain. I invented a no-complaining program a few years ago. I got the idea from Tim Ferris, back when I still gave a shit about productivity and life hacks. I called it No Complaining, No Giving Up. It involved standing in front of the kitchen window every morning, picking up three smooth little rocks from a green glass dish on the sill, and reminding myself, be brave, don’t complain, don’t give up.
It actually worked. I got a lot done in those years.
I don’t do the thing with the rocks anymore. I’m not trying to be productive. I’m free to give up on things. But I still try to reel in the complaining.
So when I say this summer was hard, I’m not complaining. It’s just a fact.
Other facts:
Spending three months in the place that holds so many memories of my daughter, of our family life – it hurts. It might be too hard.
The second year of grief is different but not easier.
Accepting the relentless persistence of pain is full-time work.
All of the above makes me tired.
But we’re traveling again,
and for me, at this stage of life, at this stage of grief, change is good. The maples have started to turn red in New Hampshire, but we’re on our way to a coastal island where it will still feel like high summer, complete with hordes of biting insects and an active hurricane season.
We have volunteer jobs at Hunting Island State Park for September and October. After that, anything is possible. And once again, we’re at the edge of the unknown. It feels right.
Last post, I promised I would give you a little tour of our trailer setup at the farm where we’ve been staying this summer. Video and some pics below.
The trailer compound
at our friend’s farm started as one of my crazy ideas. In the spring of ’20 we were getting ready to sell our house. Kiki had her own apartment, the house was too big for just Eric and me, and it wasn’t where we’d ever imagined spending the rest of our lives. We’d always intended to go back on the road after Eric retired, but it wasn’t time for that yet.
I proposed my idea:
“Why don’t we live in a campground for the summer? Then in the fall, when it gets too cold, we could rent a place, or do housesitting or whatever. Give us time to figure out what’s next.”
Eric is always on board for a crazy idea. We already had a little camper in our back yard, and a couple of other trailers stored on some guy’s property. The next step was to get rid of most of our stuff from the house, and throw the rest in a storage unit.
Over the next few months the campground idea morphed into something better, and by the time we sold our house, instead of relocating to a campsite in the woods, we had a new temporary home: three of our trailers nestled in the barnyard of our friend’s farm, at the edge of 180 acres of peaceful meadows and wooded hills.
We got a long-term housesitting job for the winter.
We thought we’d do that for one, maybe two years.
But the next year I had cancer, and Eric decided to postpone retirement so I could stay on his health insurance, and the following year I was still recovering and it was just nice to stay at the farm.
This year was our fourth summer there. Thank god for our kind and generous friends, who claim to want us around.
Here’s a video peek:
Whoops, we were in the midst of getting ready to leave and I ran out of time to film the inside of the other trailer.
In our traveling life, we tow a 22-foot trailer. It’s the first new one we’ve ever owned and we’re still getting used to the fact that everything works and nothing leaks. At the farm, we have a compound of three vintage trailers. They’re not getting towed anywhere. (Yes there are leaks and there’s not time to fix all the things that don’t work) One trailer is kitchen + living + dining + bathroom, and the other two are for Eric and me to have our own little lairs. It works out great.
But what kind of people
keep all these trailers lying around?
Eric and I have bought, fixed up, camped in and sold maybe fifteen trailers over the years. Oh, and one motorhome. We never actually went mad for trailers. We didn’t have one of those places like you see out West, twenty barren acres along the highway with dozens of rusting RV’s. Although that, plus a junkyard, would be Eric’s dream home if I wasn’t around.
Fixing up old trailers can be addictive. You get the creative satisfaction of renovating a house, but without spending all that money and time. Most of our trailers were just a few hundred dollars and we fixed them up together. We had some Airstreams but we like old Sunlines and Holiday Ramblers too. It’s dirty work but fun. Kiki even renovated her own Holiday Rambler, after high school, and Eric taught her to tow on a cross-country father-daughter trip. Now, her trailer is part of our compound, and it’s where I sleep, in a big white bed surrounded by windows on three sides, with breeze carrying the scent of hay and sounds of birds at dawn.
I want to tell you about a beautiful thing
that happened this summer. Something that made me think a lot about where inspiration comes from, and how one artist’s creative spark can open a portal into a new work for another artist.
Several years ago, I read the poem “Once in the Forties” by William Stafford. The wistful, nostalgic tone made me think of my own travels. I made a little painting inspired by the poem. And then this past June I wrote a post about our beginnings as a traveling family, and I included the painting and the poem in the post.
A few days later, I received an email from a reader, the singer/songwriter Jim Terry. Jim said,
“…I took the liberty of writing a song inspired by your Substack post ‘It Was the Best Thing We Ever Did’ …The thing that really got me going was the painting which I loved, the poem at the end, and the background stories.”
Jim took those elements, tweaked some details and made an entirely new creation from that inspiration. In describing his process, Jim says,
“I particularly like inspiration from podcasts, writings, short stories, essays, opinion pieces, real life stories, anything that strikes me and hits some aspect of my personal narrative, something that hits me emotionally. That is certainly what happened here”
It was such an honor to receive Jim’s song and I hope you enjoy listening to it.
“It Was the Best Thing We Ever Did”
Written and Performed by Jim Terry
And something else:
After listening to a Rumble Strip podcast episode entitled “Finn and the Bell,” Jim wrote a song called “The Bell.” The podcast’s producer, Erica Heilman, loved it and featured it in the followup episode.
Jim told me,
“The original episode of “Finn and the Bell’ won a Peabody Award and put Rumble Strip on the map. It is a stunning piece of journalism. It is relevant to you and to me and to anyone who has lost a loved one and is navigating the world of grief.”
The Rumble Strip podcasts, both “Finn and the Bell”, and the follow-up, “Tara” are linked below. They are well worth listening to.
Links:
If you missed the post that inspired Jim’s song “It Was the Best Thing We Ever Did” you can read or listen to it here: It Was the Best Thing We Ever Did
Jim Terry’s website: Terry Family Band
Thanks for reading! Love, Tina
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I love hearing from you! I value every comment and appreciate you being here. Thank you.
As others have said, there is so much to love in this post: 1) Jim Terry's song seems to perfectly capture the tone of love, sadness, and presence in your writing and 2) your 4 facts. I don't mean that I love that you're experiencing that degree of hurt and grief. I mean I love your simple, unapologetic acknowledgement of what you're feeling. May your new travels sprinkle some joy into your grieving process.
Every post is glorious. Thank you, my sweet friend, for bringing us inside--your trailer, your heart.