I’d originally anticipated making this post about our first full month of the Manonash life; the fun we’re having, the challenges we’ve faced, the work we’ve been doing, and what we’ve learned along the way. Instead, I find myself wondering, certainly not for the first time, what others might be thinking…

“We sold our home!”

To most, this would be a fairly momentous announcement, filled with excitement, anticipation, and bittersweet memories, usually followed by a standard question along the lines of, “Oh, cool what’s your new house like?” (Spoiler Alert: There is no new house.)

Conversely, for us, we sold our home one year to the day after we bought it. Not because we didn’t love it, it was a great house! And, not because we couldn’t afford it, our mortgage was dirt cheap. No, for those who know us well, their followup was more of an assumption that best tells the story, “So, you’ve already had enough of suburban life, eh?” Indeed we had.

For over ten years, Megan and I have been chasing all sorts of adventures together in the vein of what many might consider to be an “alternative lifestyle.” To some; those with traditional jobs, families, mortgages, and, dare I say, standard expectations, our way of life is often met with a mix of confusion, curiosity, and apprehensive jealousy. One person once asked us, _“What are you searching for, happiness?”_ Well, no, actually – we’d already found it. The trick was fitting our happiness into the worldview of others.

In the height of the recession, after the non-profit I worked for was forced to shut down, we did a few odd jobs, Megan working for a hotel while I started to make a decent living as a photographer. Eventually we turned down some flattering job offers and launched a successful business that allowed us to travel together across the U.S. for long periods of time. In a very small RV. With two dogs. This gave us a taste for three things to which we’d soon become addicted; teamwork, wanderlust, and the flexibility this combination affords.

For awhile we lived in an amazing waterfront home on the Puget Sound directly across from Seattle. Friends and family couldn’t quite grasp why we’d give that up to live on a small sailboat when we weren’t busy traveling. Eventually we bought a bigger sailboat to live aboard while preparing to launch a seasonal floating bed & breakfast aboard a classic wooden yacht. Due to zoning issues, we eventually sold both boats and, missing the mountains, we moved to another amazing waterfront home on Dungeness Bay with views from the North Cascades to the Olympic Mountains. Again, something just didn’t feel right and we found ourself buying yet another sailboat, a small catamaran, to live aboard while gaining our USCG Captian’s licenses in order to offer crewed week-long sailing charters in Washington’s unparalelled San Juan Islands. I spent the off season with various writing and public speaking projects while Megan accepted on offer to manage a local yarn shop benefitting from national adoration. One thing led to another and at the end of a long wet winter aboard (with two perpetually moist dogs), we impulsively, possibly reactively, sold the boat to the first buyer from CraigsList.

Settling down into the 9-5 of retail management, we bought a modest but truly wonderful home and began filling it with furniture that had been waiting in storage, though most of our efforts went to planting fruit gardens along the south-facing slope of the property. It seemed like not a week went by without family or friends coming to stay awhile, sipping wine from one of the porches, enjoying lazy breakfasts from the enormous kitchen, or enjoying a movie on the big screen in the dedicated media room. They’d leave town and Megan would enjoy lengthy baths before picking out an outfit for work from the walk-in closet. I’d work from my home office before wandering around the empty halls thinking, “Is this… it? I mean, really it?”

It wasn’t until one of my oldest friends came to visit. After catching up on over 20 years of each other’s lives while picking blueberries in the garden, she asked plainly, “So, how long do you think you’ll make it here?”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “We just bought the place!”

“You’ve been in this place for six months and you haven’t even put any of your artwork on the walls yet. I give you one year before you’re gone.”

As it turns out, she couldn’t have been more right. Fighting the urge to wander again, we hunkered down for the winter. Megan kept busy at work while I converted a large room we never used into workshop to dabble with building arch top guitars. Yet, try as we might to fit into the traditional mold, exactly one year after taking possession of the house, we accepted our first offer – just an hour after listing the home on CraigsList.

So, where are we today? It might be easier to explain where we aren’t. Amid the packing and planning and quitting and organizing for our next phase of downsized life, we threw a couple yard sales to liquidate everything we couldn’t sell online; our beds, our couches, televisions, cars, you name it – anything that wouldn’t fit in the back of our truck or be explicitly useful in the near future.

When buyers noticed that *everything* was for sale and all the rooms and closets were already empty, they’d ask, “Oh, so I guess you’ve already moved to your new place?” Nope… we’re just downsizing. “But, what about your furniture?”

“It is built-in.” Inevitably, this response would steer the conversation to our plans of living remotely, spending half our year in the mountains and the remainder on the sea.

The most common followup questions carried a repeating theme; “But, how will you watch TV? How will you get online? Will your phones work?”

At the time I would just shrug a slight gesture that could have easily been interpreted as “hadn’t thought of that yet.” But, in reality, we had thought long and hard about it all for over ten years and what my shrug meant, “If you gotta ask, you might never know.”

In trying to explain to a family member why we sold our house in preparation for a new adventure, they asked of our house they’d never seen, “But, that beautiful home. Aren’t you going to miss it?”

All I can say is that after our first month away from the deadbolts and microwaves, the climate control and on-demand media… No. I don’t miss it. Even when it snows in June or when the plumbing goes out. Even when my knees are shot or the howling winds just won’t stop – I haven’t thought once about the last place that we called home. (Well, until now.)

To many, a house, their house, made of sticks and plaster sheets and hidden wires and asphalt shingles – that happens to be where they call home. But, for us, so far, in this next phase of life – our roof is a little taller, our climate less controlled, our neighbors a little more furry, but our piece of mind, continually annihilated and unconditioned, is beginning to find a little peace, a new habitude of location and mind.

Hasta Pronto,
Steve