So, You Want to Be Homeless
In about two weeks, the Home and Garden Television Network will be calling to tell me I’ve won their Dream House Sweepstakes and the people of Warren, VT are waiting with open arms. About two weeks after that, AirBnB is going to let me know that I did, indeed, win their “1 Euro House” contest and will be hosting a vacation rental in Italy for a year. I will be overcome with emotion, but not surprise as, truly who didn’t see this coming?
I’ll donate all of our furniture—the couch with the dog stains, the upholstered dining room chairs that the cat has tried to disembowel—and spend the next year of my life enjoying vats of espresso as I look over the rolling hills of Sicily, perhaps purchase a small villa for after the contest has run its course because the Italians can’t bear to see me go, and then spend my days jet setting back and forth between Italy and Vermont. Sicily and Warren. Think of all that cheese.
My family? Oh, right. Sure, they can come.
While I wait on the news, I spend my days on real estate sites researching where home base might be: Boston, MA, Langley, WA, Waterbury, VT, St. John, U.S.V.I., Brooklyn, NY. The list is long and nonsensical.
In 2022, we are going to purposely make ourselves homeless. My husband hates when I put it that way, but it’s true. Nine years ago we moved to Southern California hoping to start a west coast life. And we did. We met once-in-a-lifetime friends, our kids went to dream schools, I finally became a writer and my husband captains his own boat. We nailed it in all senses of the word except one: we never bought a home. At first we just wanted to see if we liked it. Then we needed time to save up for a California house (we had saved and even sold a New York house, but that wasn’t enough for a California house). In January 2020, we had met our goals: our finances were ready, our realtor was poised and the seven years of me watching HGTV was finally going to pay off. Then COVID hit. “Surely NOW we will be able to afford the house of our dreams! This will definitely affect the market.” And it absolutely did.
Three years into the pandemic our California dream moved on without us. Rents are 30% higher and climbing. You need three briefcases of cash and a promise to fund the college education of all of the seller’s children in order to buy a house here. And soon not even that will be enough. Once in my 20’s, I went out on a friend’s boat in Boston Harbor. He anchored it, we dove off and swam towards a sand bar. As we climbed out of the water, we realized that the boat looked farther away. Seems he didn’t actually anchor the boat and, carried by the current, it was headed for open ocean. We nearly drowned trying to swim back. This is the California real estate market. I’m done trying not to drown.
So, in August, during our “Coffee and Contemplation” time my husband and I played that dangerous game “What If?” What if we stopped trying to buy a house in California? What if we stopped trying to buy a house at all? What if we just disappeared into the world for a year?
The conversation was fun and exciting, especially since we were rolling deep into a year and 3/4 of a pandemic. Travel had become driving as far as we could without getting out of the car and locking ourselves in an AirBnB in the middle of the woods. Why not travel the world for a year?
Well, I’ll tell you why not. All those countries and their silly rules about COVID. A self-owned business that needs to continue thriving. Three more years of high school. An assumed freshman year of college at a (currently) unknown school. A dog with severe separation anxiety.
But that didn’t stop us from telling EVERYONE that this was it, this was the plan, we were leaving it all behind to travel for a year. If there is anything I know about us and our ability to talk smack, it is that once we tell people, no matter how insane the idea, it is game f’ing on (see: Bacon Fest NY 2011, 2012).
I’ve sent my passport off to be renewed. My kid’s school has given me the plan for how to approach online classes and keep in line with graduation. We’ve sat on Zoom calls with gap year consultants. I’m emailing with a lawyer in NY who can help me get an Italian passport.
I shop for houses in the U.S. because nothing but a storage unit to come back to scares the crap out of me. And we STILL have that dog with separation anxiety that we just can’t figure out. Maybe he can stay with someone who lives in our new home in Boston… or Brooklyn. Philly? D.C.?
We are in a holding pattern, trying not to unravel. I’m starting to itch every time someone says, “one day at a time” but it’s true. Russia might invade the Ukraine. The CDC released a list of countries not to travel to. Midterm rhetoric is getting nasty. Every day is another reason why we are crazy for walking away from our happy, stable life. But also another reason why we must go.
So, let me know if you’d like me to make up a room for you in either our uber-contemporary Vermont “farmhouse” or in the newly remodeled townhouse in Sambuca. Either one is about as possible as whatever is coming next for us. Whatever it is, there will absolutely be one certainty: there will be cheese.