It is hard to believe that it has already been a month since my arrival here on the island of Nantucket with my wife and our stuff via ferry. Yet as hard as that is to believe it is even harder to fathom that in the six months or so since we sold our home we have downscaled our lifestyle from living in a 1400 square foot cottage to a 400 square foot studio. And believe it or not, we fit virtually all our 400 or so possessions inside our Volvo convertible, [which rode with us half the way on Amtrak’s Auto Train before we drove it the other half of the way here]. Besides that, all we own is our Vespa scooter, [which we shipped to Cape Cod and brought over with us on the ferry from Hyannis], and a couple smallish storage bins with stuff at my mother’s in Florida.
And how do I know we own about 400 things? Because I counted them, of course! I compiled a detailed inventory of our stuff and even broke it into categories for simple tracking. To that end, my wife and I each own about 100 articles of clothing so that is half our stuff, with the other half coming from about 100 media evenly distributed between books and music and another 100 miscellaneous items ranging from toothbrushes to computers.
So in about seven months we have transitioned from a seven-room house to moving here with about seven bags stuffed with the favorite of our possessions left after selling our house, as well as most of its furnishings through a couple of garage sales. And the truly amazing part of it all is that my wife and I embarked upon this downscaling adventure voluntarily and in total agreement about how it was to transpire. Stay tuned for more updates from these Nantucket Nomads!
