How We Became a Tribe of 3 Part One

Since it seems I have gained a few new readers in the past few weeks I thought I would round out the year on this blog by posting a short history of who we are and how we have come to be living and traveling in the Airstream. I will break this into three posts or so... I am going to greatly abbreviate the story, it's too much to try to post it all at once. Plus my brains would melt out of my head if I tried to.

I grew up in the Midwest in northern Illinois just shy of the Wisconsin state border... or "The Cheddar Curtain" as they like to call it. I don't have any siblings. There's not much you need to know about that portion of my life other than that I was a tom boy when I was little and then I transitioned into a punk rock girl and still later in to a more hippy dippy type of kid and I spent a lot of time reading books, hanging out at the park and smoking pot like it was my job. I actually worked 82.9 million different ridiculous jobs from the time I was in high school until the time I ran away from home at the age of 27. I worked as a waitress. I worked at a junk yard. I even worked as a mortgage loan officer at a bank (that was the silliest job I ever had) and finally at a Japanese Garden before moving away. Why did I run away? Because I got married. I will keep this short... but I married a guy when I was 27 and it was the biggest and best mistake of my life. It freaked me out badly enough that I just had to change everything and get away from all that I was familiar with in order to get my head straight. So after 8 months of miserable marriage to a drunk moron I left my "husband" and made the radical choice to move to Nantucket Island off the coast of Massachusetts. I had found an inn keeping job there and decided to go for it. Nobody had seen this coming and everyone thought I had cracked. Friends and family did not want me to go... but I did. I cleared things up, packed my things into my car and took off for Nantucket within two weeks of finding the job. I had no idea where I was going... I had picked this place literally at random. I made my ferry reservation to get my car out to the island and I took off.




I arrived on Nantucket in April of 2000. It blew me away. It was SO different than any place I had ever been. It had breath taking beauty, incredible history, it was quaint to the point of being surreal and it was distant. The rest of the world sort of falls away when you are out there. The little island is 30 miles out to sea for those of you unfamiliar. I HATED my job at the inn. The woman who owned it was a serious bitch/lunatic. And I was made to live in a tiny, moldy cellar room in the basement. So that job only lasted for a few months until I was able to secure work elsewhere. I got a job at a health food store right smack dab in the center of downtown and made great friends with the owner, Bernadette. She became such a great source of energy and comfort for me. I met all the island characters while working in her shop. Everyone came there for lunch or for vitamins or whatever. I made a few lasting friends (that's you David) and thus began my foundation on the island. I really felt instantly at home there thanks to these generous people. Everything was not coming up roses though... I still felt alone in the sense that I had lost myself somehow along the way in my twenties. I found a place to contemplate who I was and heal my lost soul by the side of the Atlantic Ocean.




Bernadette eventually had to close up shop due to big box competition moving on island and I found work at a little gourmet shop one street over. The people who owned this shop (Patty and Jon) became family to me. Their daughter had just left for college a few days before I went in looking for a job.... her name is Bethany and she has long strawberry blond hair. Patty nearly shoved me down to the ground (ala Elaine on Seinfeld) when I told her my name. I could not have found a more perfect place to weather the winter on Nantucket. Because it does get pretty much like that movie 'The Shining' out there come February. Everyone gets a little sketchy.

While working at Nantucket Gourmet I met Billy. The sandwich shop pretty much fed the whole of downtown come mid winter. He would drop in to grab lunch a few times a week and eventually asked me to come to an art opening at the Artist's Association Gallery where he worked. Little did he know this was the beginning of the end for him.

That's it for today.... I will keep you hanging there for a few days! And oh yeah... Happy New Year! I almost forgot!