When a longing for home hits most people, it often has to do with missing loved ones. When I left home as a teen to attend camp and other overnight functions, I missed my family.
As heat-evicted RVers, we’ve been experiencing a different kind of homesickness. We miss our space.
How we got to this point
We’ve spent the past six weeks in the Arizona heat working on getting a mobile home ready to rent for the winter season. When we bought the place in July, it appeared to need only cosmetic fixes. As with many things in life, addressing one thing revealed other things that required attention. Anyone who owns sticks and bricks has likely experienced the same situation.
Those added issues seemed to quickly spiral into a money pit, like the eponymous movie depicts. This snowball effect has left us exhausted both mentally and physically.
For the past month, we’ve been living in the rental home. We wake up, I go to work for my job, and Bob goes to work on the house. At the end of my workday, I join Bob in projects. Around 7 p.m. or so, we quit for the day and sit down to eat, typically something from a restaurant. Because we’re so busy, we don’t cook like normal.
On the weekends, we dedicate nearly every waking moment to the projects.
Why we’re homesick
Our fifth-wheel RV is only about 400 square feet. The mobile home is more than twice that size. It’s a great place with a comfy bed (the mattress we took out of our home on wheels), a decent kitchen, separate office space for me to work, and two cuddle-compliant reclining loveseats.
With all that, what’s got us down? Perhaps it’s the fact that this is the longest we’ve been away from our RV since we sold our sticks and bricks and moved into it in April 2020. Maybe it’s because we never fully moved out of our rig, which makes us feel unsettled. Or maybe it’s because when we finally have a little time to sit and relax in the rental house, we notice things that need to be addressed. It’s a constant, nagging reminder that our work isn’t complete.
Although we’re in the same park where we spend our winters, we miss our home and our creature comforts.
As the famous quote from “The Wizard of Oz” goes, “There’s no place like home.” Whether that home is a tent, an RV, a modular house, a mansion, or some other structure doesn’t matter. The saying still applies.
We get this feeling of homesickness sometimes while moochdocking too, when we spend lots of time in loved ones’ homes.
What we can do about homesickness
We can dwell on the homesick feeling and be sad about our circumstances. Or we can use it to remind ourselves of all the things we have to be grateful for: a home on wheels that allows us to travel and see God’s magnificent creation, the freedom to visit loved ones across the country, the opportunities to be close to each other and to grow through challenging circumstances.
We can also admire the progress we’ve made on the rental home and even daydream about moving back into our living quarters at the end of this adventure. And we can take pleasure in the fact that we’ve learned new skills, such as how to install mobile home skirting and cabinet hinges.
We’ll be away from Tagalong for another few weeks while we celebrate what we’ve accomplished on the rental with a transpacific cruise and recuperate from all the blood, sweat, tears, aches, and pains we experienced along the way. With grateful hearts, we look forward to that reunion. As a well-known proverb says, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
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