The reality of my new housing situation is starting to sink in. This week I closed out my storage unit in Portland. Yesterday I finished unloading the dregs from my car, leaving just the bare bed platform and empty shelves as testaments to my former life as a nomad. Eventually I will vacuum the dust, bugs, and fingernail clippings from the filthy rug and pretend like that time in my life happened to someone else.
Since I left Portland in 2021, I have worked hard to streamline my life. Time and again, I gritted my pearlies and embraced successive waves of death cleaning. I donated my appliances to my roommate. I replaced my furniture with camping chairs. I traded in my shelves for plastic tote bins, solar panels, and portable power stations.
I spent a lot of money turning my car into a liveable space. When I say “liveable,” I mean a space that could provide me the basics: kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom, all packed into one soccer-mom minivan.
I’ve always been able to cram my life into small spaces so turning my car into a home wasn’t all that difficult. It took me a while to figure out what I wanted and needed, and that uncertainty cost me a lot of money and time; however, after a year and a half, I’d worked out most of the kinks in the nomadic lifestyle. If housing hadn’t appeared, my next task would have been to add solar on the roof.
Loading and unloading in Veneta was hard. Books! Sewing machine! I berate myself for keeping so much stuff. After all these years of downsizing! Possessions are a plague upon the land. Days later, my muscles are still protesting. On the other hand, my reward for unloading in the rain was a rainbow.
Now I see what I have. Besides my camping gear, I have lots of blankets, a few clothes, some household goods, and the ashes of my two dead cats. It’s not a lot but I still feel overwhelmed with stuff.
Now that I’m housed, the possession plague has deposited spores in my brain. I need a bed. I need a table and a chair, maybe a shelf. I definitely need some lamps. I dread getting more stuff, not just because this is the worst possible time of year for shopping but also because if this housing adventure becomes unaffordable, I will once again have to downsize. It’s heart wrenching to fall in love with a chair and then come to hate it when nobody will take it off your hands.
How do I all of a sudden stop living one life and start living another? Who am I if I’m no longer the freedom-loving nomad? No longer the stealthy arthritic vehicle dwelling senior? No longer the resourceful intrepid roadtripper? Did I just stop being those people and become someone else?
Ha. As usual, I still haven’t figured out who I am. This existential question seems to be a recurring theme in my blogposts. It’s ridiculous how a self-centered theme could provide me with fourteen years of musings, rants, diatribes, and complaints but that is what has happened. As long as I can keep writing, I don’t expect anything to change. Whatever I am now, I’m still a card-carrying chronic malcontent.