One week from today Jett and I hand the keys to our house over to the renters. At that moment we will have no place to live other than our fifth wheel. This is a condition known amongst the traveling crowd as “sticks and bricks homelessness”, abbreviated to “s&b homeless” when talking to other RVers. It seems that “s&b” is part of the lexicon of fulltimers and conveys a certain disdain for those who are stuck in houses that cannot move.
We are now down to those last, irrevocable tasks that will confirm our fulltimer status: giving away or storing the final pieces of furniture, selling the second vehicle, cancelling newspaper delivery, arranging for the cable company to remove their hardware. I also donated four boxes of books – a mix of technical and fiction and over 300 in all – to a local charity. That was hard for me as some of those books have been with me since college. I had nearly a full set of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries – most of them printed over 40 years ago. But there is simply no room in an RV for pleasure reading material (yes, we may take a campground directory, a couple of blogging texts, and perhaps a couple of issues or Reader’s Digest for the commode, but no fiction) – I will get paperbacks as necessary and will discard ruthlessly. Perhaps I will get a Kindle. But we are NOT turning our fiver into a mobile lending library.
I was feeling pretty confident that we wouldn’t have more stuff than would fit. But now, seeing the final set of boxes that need to be carted up to NH, I am not so sure. It is going to be packed. We will probably have to do some final weeding that second week of September, before we hit the road.
Maybe we can have a yard sale at the campground. Good stuff from the newly s&b homeless.