I thought, I can do anything for a couple of years.  In the scale of a lifetime, a couple of years is a blip, especially when you have 2 small kids.  Time seems to move so fast, so a couple of years, no problem.  I can do this.  I can live anywhere for a couple of years.

When trying to find a shelter to live in while we make our new home – and that’s what we considered it, a shelter – we had lots of ideas.  We initially wanted a trailer/mobile home, just because that seemed the most comfortable on the list of options, but one was hard to find.  We didn’t want a new one – $50,000 for a temporary home wasn’t an option.  That was the number I heard from various mobile home dealers I called.  Used ones in the paper were suspect.  Descriptions like “haz-mat clean-up” and “salvageable” were used in several descriptions.  So we discussed, in no particular order:

-Yurts,

– building the barn first and living there while we build the house

– trying to somehow fix up the trailer that came with the property

– a camper (Joe read an article about a family of 6 that lived in a camper off the grid for 5 years.  I drew the line.)

After the last suggestion, desperation mode hit and I dove head first into finding us a place to live.  Luckily, it didn’t take long.

I pulled up my laptop and went to CraigsList.  I typed “mobile home” into the search bar, hit enter, and the first line read:  “Like New Mobile Home, 1995, 900 sq ft, Judah.”  Judah, Indiana.  Not far away at all.  Twenty minutes south of Bloomington.  1995 – did you know a trailer is classified like a car, with a year?  Anyway, I called right away and spoke to one of the owners, a twenty-something woman who lived in the trailer with her husband on her family’s property.  She was desperate to have her mother out of her business, we were desperate for somewhere to live.  Win-win.  Joe and I went to look at it the next day.

Honestly, when I walked in, it was a life changing moment.  Not only did it widen my narrow-minded viewpoint on trailer living, it was like taking that first deep breath of air after swimming underwater.  It was exactly what we needed and no more.   Bring our possessions that were both beautiful and useful and leave everything else behind. It would be a chance to design our life from the ground up.

A new life was beginning.  A life of less inside and more outside, less stuff and more doing.  A life of less leading to a life of more.