People and Places in passing

When I tell people that I live in a van, which I inevitably tell most everyone I meet, one of the common first questions is, how did you end up doing that? Why do you live in a van? What made you want to do that? It always seems silly to me, like I’m that girl that chased a rabbit down the hole and just kind of fell into it. Truth be told I’d always wanted to do it, but being someone with a short attention span and an incredible inability to plan ahead I never thought I’d be able to make living in a van work.

It was Summer in Ann Arbor and I was sitting on the couch with my partner at the time, and he says we’re not moving. Up until this moment I had been a woman planning to move to Connecticut with my boyfriend and my little dog. It was sort of like we both knew what it meant, but in the days/ weeks to come both sides would present our closing arguments, we still had some things to talk about and frankly breakups are hard. The bigger hurdle for me was that my soulmate and best friend had already found a roommate. Knowing we could make it work, but knowing more that I needed to jump I decided, now was as good a time as any to move into my car because I may never have the chance or the chaos to really do it again.

I was going to make living in my 2001 Ford Expedition work, and it was work. I started off feeling pretty rowdy and handy building a bed frame out of found materials, as I’ve seemed to do with everything I make. The bed was some old pieces of wood I had, and a few long metal bed frame pieces I had garbage picked months prior thinking it was the full bed frame, and unable to throw this bunch of metal out, I actually ended up finding use for it in Bertha. I had always watched videos of people moving into vehicles but hadn’t realized how much to pay attention to the layout, I didn’t know how to plan for this, and my heavens I had so much stuff.

The preparation time before launch was about a month. Within that month, I grieved not living with my best friend anymore, I was petrified of going out on my own in such a peculiar way. I questioned myself and I really had no choice. I hugged my clothes, slept in my bed for the last time, gave away all my stuff and I wept. My mom, brother, and nephews came over the final day, and our landlords, got us A and W and my nephew’s played in the driveway as we loaded up the things I’d decided were keepers to take to storage. I was surrounded by community and love sending me off to the next adventure.