Redefining home
Home as a garden, a bus, and barbed wire
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I used to live on a bus.
For about three years, after nearly one year of converting the vehicle from a yellow school bus to a livable home, the only dwelling I could (and wanted to) call home was my Blue Bird with a diesel engine. I traveled all over the western states of America in Addie the Adventure Bus. Towns, cities, National Parks, and RV parks could all be written into a line item as my address, with ADVNTR shouting from the bus’s vanity plate.
Then, the universal plot twist of COVID happened, and it began to feel more like a metal cage than a home.
In April 2021, while living on the bus alongside the Oregon coastline, my husband and I watched a live feed of an auction. For 6 months, we had been searching for the perfect stationary house to own and reside in our hometown of Wichita, Kansas.
As the auctioneer continued to tick up the price, we were the only bidder against one other person. My heart felt swollen in my chest and there was buzzing in my ears as, at last, the auctioneer bellowed “Sold!” and the house was ours.
Oregon continued to be home for 3 more months. As we inched into the beginning of summer, we left Oregon, we left the west, and we left 2 timezones to drive toward Kansas in the bus. Our final stretch included a 14-hour drive day, thanks to the diesel engine acting oddly and a fear that turning off the bus would mean it wouldn’t turn back on. She was putting up a final fight in the last week of our shared adventure. So, onward, arriving just after midnight in our newest (and oldest) timezone.
The following day, we went to see the house—our house—for the first time.
A ceremonial carrying-over-the-threshold felt appropriate, so I picked up our dog, Penelope, and stepped through the front door. We headed to the backyard after wandering around the first floor for a bit. We had a fenced-in yard now, one where Penelope could explore and claim as her own.
As my eyes swept across the brown somewhat grass, my gaze found another pair of eyes. It took me a breath to understand what I was seeing. A small bunny had been caught in the previous homeowner’s raised garden bed—metal wire threading through the creature’s leg. She was trapped.
After realizing what I was seeing, I rushed over to the bunny, circling, trying to find the best possible way to release her. The wire stabbed straight down her left hind leg—shit and blood dripping down past her paw. She had been stuck in that spot for a long time. As I attempted to free her, I tried to keep ahold so I could take her inside the house and attempt to fix up the mangled leg. But she leaped away from me immediately, her worthless leg flailing behind her as she dove under my fence, out of my backyard, into the wild of my new neighborhood streets.
It felt like an omen.
But it probably wasn’t. Now that we’ve lived in our house for over two years, it’s easy to say that it was just this thing that happened, and the ‘stuck’ metaphors that could have plagued me at the time of ‘settling down’ were moot and irrelevant. Glennon Doyle wrote in her book Untamed,
“The moral arc of our life bends toward meaning—especially if we bend it that way with all our damn might.”
After finally being in my new space—my new home—I felt especially vulnerable to force the best possible meaning.
I had chosen this house. I had chosen this city. I had chosen to move out of the bus and into a home with no wheels. I was happy and healing from the isolation of bus life and the era of a pandemic.
Because, what was the alternative?
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