The Idea

Raised on good land and made for travel. Twenty-some years after my parents did their “back to the land thing” I did mine, except the land I went back to kept shifting. First a bit of English countryside, then the pavement and urban gardens of New England, then the ever-changing landscape of Nova Scotia. It was with my hands in those latter soils that I caught the idea of having a home of my own… that I could take with me as I moved. Not a yurt, though I could see the appeal. I was looking for something more substantial and more complex, a tidy little house whose every layer and joint I would know. When in England I orbited through Bristol several times, returning again & again to the painted gypsy caravan on the third (?) floor of the city museum, totally taken in by its tiny opulence. In Nova Scotia, with my bicycle wheels spinning beneath me, I was endlessly eying garden sheds and the ubiquitous trailers parked in driveways. Outbuildings and homes on wheels. Turns out, other good folks had put this together before me. My father introduced me to the world of tiny houses, neat little constructions that shrink conventional home features into the space that exists above a flatbed trailer. So here’s my hand sizing up my parents’ cottage – the Bay of Fundy’s at my back – and just outside the frame is parked an 8x18foot Load Trail car hauler, the movable foundation of my future home.