Carol Lee

We've been told we're brave or
adventurous. We know that's code for crazy.

Our mad meandering of the last
eight years looks set to continue for the foreseeable future. Ours is not the
tragic homelessness of poverty or extreme weather, but the ridiculous
homelessness of an Englishman who wants to live in America with freedom and an
Anglacized American who wants to live in England with family.

In these last eight years, we've
twice given up the comfort of living like normal people – once in Europe and
now in the U.S. We sold our house in England, ostensibly to take an extended
trip, bought a trailer and "did" Europe, sold the trailer and moved to an
apartment in Washington State.

We had a year and a half hiatus
with no obligation to hitch up and move on but with seemingly fewer sunny days
than could be counted on the fingers and toes of just one soggy person we
packed up and hitched up again. The grand plan now as we weary once again of
cohabiting 24/7 in an 8 by 30 foot box is to look for the perfect place to live
before himself takes to the gypsy life for good and I become a trailer gran.
We've (meaning I've) by no means completely agreed on living permanently in the
United States, but by visiting all 48 continental states we're sure to come
across an ideal home in a perfect community that is somewhere not too hot, too
cold, too wet or too dry, with no spiders, no mosquitoes or other hideous
insects, no snakes, no bears, no tornadoes, no hurricanes, no floods, no
earthquakes, no tsunamis, no volcanoes, no deep snow, no humidity, no wild
fires and has a low cost of living. That was six years ago and we're still at a
stalemate.

Not so long ago an East coast
girl from Baltimore and an east coast Brit from Suffolk lived in a
chocolate-box-pretty country cottage on half an acre of landscaped gardens in
the East Anglia region of England. The cottage was young for an English
dwelling, 150 years old but with soft pink rendered walls and a steeply pitched
tiled roof it was reminiscent of a cottage many centuries old. With snow icing
the eaves it could have graced a Christmas card.

Somehow I let myself be lured
into our present nomadic existence. Our house was sold and life as we knew it
was packed into storage. Like I said, what planet was I on when I agreed to
this?