My wife and I are homeless

My wife and I are homeless.

I mean that literally. At present (January 2013), Anna and I have no permanent residence—not since May of last year. We've chosen to move through life without a house, apartment, or any other kind of dwelling that is dedicated to us. We're not, of course, living on the street—we hop from one short-term rental to another (thank you, AirBnB, Craigslist, and Google), occasionally renting a camp site and pitching a tent. Our last (and longest) stretch in a tent was eight days, leading up to Christmas, just a few weeks ago (living in Southern California, tenting in December is actually possible, though it can still be somewhat chilly).

As we share custody of my 11-year-old son with his mom, we're committed to remaining in the North San Diego County area, in general terms, though we do some traveling (San Francisco and Wallagrass, ME are two of our most favorite places on Earth). But, quite literally, we have no permanent physical address.

Is this prudent? Sustainable? Sane? Hell, I don't know. We don't know. Just experimenting with life, at this point.

It's not as crazy as it sounds, though. We actually have some dedicated real estate, having converted my son's mom's garage into an office, where we work most days, and where we store some of our belongings (much of it camping gear). My son's mom and her husband also generously offer us their guest bedroom, between short-term rental gigs—so we have an easy fall-back. We've only punted to an unplanned motel room once or twice in the last seven months.

My wife and I telecommute (can't really say that we work from “home”), doing IT support and web app development. This, of course, can be done from nearly anywhere, and I'd like to think that we do it effectively and efficiently (having telecommuted for nearly seven years now). We do this mostly from our office (with a big, fat, fiber internet pipe), but we also like to get out to the coffee shop from time to time.

I'm happy to say that my wife and I contribute significantly to my son's upbringing. Because our office is in their garage, and because he's home-schooled, we see him nearly every day. We participate in said home-schooling (Anna more so than me), and we play chess, ride bike, talk about the news and what's happening in the world, and read books together. He has a permanent home, where he can learn about life's responsibilities, like mowing the lawn, raking the leaves, taking out the trash, vacuuming the car, cleaning his room—making his contribution to the household. But he also spends some time (Fridays and weekends, usually) at our various short-term rentals, where we always have a bed (or an air mattress) for him. And where there are still dishes to wash, floors to sweep, laundry to fold, etc.

We've been forced, of course, to cut a lot of clutter out of our lives, to relinquish a good chunk of our material possessions. Books that we've stopped pretending that we're going to read. Movies on DVD that we'll never watch (or watch again). Superfluous dishware, cookware. Furniture, of course (save for some office furnishings). Sports equipment—the rollerblades that we never managed to use, the racquetball gear that had been gathering dust, the man-tools that had long sat idle. Clothing that permanently adorned the closet.

We don't own a television. We lease our one (very small) car. We own some movies, all on a portable hard drive—but we can only watch them on laptop screens. We try to buy most of our books on our iPhones, magazines on the iPad.

We can't shop at Costco or Sam's Club, or buy more than a week's worth of groceries at a time. We can't have a pantry full of canned and boxed “food.” We can't have a loaded wine rack, or a fridge full of beer and soda. We can't store a closet full of rolls of toilet paper and paper towels. We can't have a garage or an attic full of junk.

Most liberating is the fact that we don't have a household to laboriously maintain. We don't have to mow the lawn, keep up the landscaping, do the spring cleaning. Laundry can't pile up very high, because our wardrobes are fairly spare. Our house is almost always clean, because a) we've only lived there a few weeks, and b) we simply don't have enough stuff to create a lot of clutter. We wash the dishes after every meal—we have to, because we don't have enough dishes, and because our rentals are usually so small that there's no room for dirty-dish clutter (and no automatic dishwasher).

I've come to terms with the fact that I'm not a man's man. I don't tinker in the garage. I don't ever open the hood of our car. I don't like to fix things. I'm not very savvy with power tools. I don't know how to convert that unused closet into an office, or how to build a deck.

This yields massive amounts of free time, right? Funny you should say that. It doesn't seem like we do have a lot of free time. I guess life fills in the cracks, no matter what choices you make, and despite your best intentions.

Still, we make an effort to focus on the things that matter. We read. We write. We talk. We exercise. We watch an occasional movie. We do crossword puzzles. We plan our next adventure. We tinker with photography, with jewelry-making, with crocheting. We meditate, contemplate, and pray.

I realize that we sound like hippies, or new-age fruitcakes. And I guess there's some truth to that—we've certainly come to feel that hyper-consumerism is a serious drag in much of the Western world. We agree with Tyler Durden, when he said, in Fight Club, that “advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.”

But we don't pretend that we'll do this forever. It's fairly stressful, especially for Anna, who handles nearly all of the logistics of rental-hopping (and the meal planning, laundry requirements, etc.). We've also been trying to have more children, which would admittedly complicate our vagabond lifestyle. If/when we have kids, we'll likely cut back on the troubadour game, maybe do 12-month rentals, say. We agree that the needs of a child don't completely mesh with life on the go. But we do feel that making a child feel at home isn't about living within the same walls, under the same roof, on the same street, or in the same town for many years. It's about being consistently surrounded by the same faces, and having real, lasting engagement, with real relationships—more talk, less TV. These are the intangible ingredients that shape loving, responsible, well-rounded human beings, but that compete directly with paying the mortgage, and the cable bill, and the cell phone bill, and the health club membership.

Who knows what the future holds for our family? We don't pretend to know, and we try not to sacrifice today for what is always an uncertain tomorrow.

So for now, we're re-thinking life, one day at a time. I'll let you know how it all turns out.