In Escrow

I’ve always wondered what it felt like to be in escrow. As it turns out, it feels pretty much like anything else. You wait for things to happen. You wait for the phone to ring. And when it does, you hope for mostly good news and not so much bad. Occasionally you run into a tedious tower of paperwork, but nothing insurmountable. You try to keep the children fed and occupied. Not that different from any other day.

But then we went to the park, and I overheard my two-year-old son telling his playmate, “I don’t have a house anymore.” Our boy isn’t so well-versed in the subtle nuances of the real estate market in general, or our escrow calendar in particular, but he has grasped the most important details. And the fact is, we aren’t just in escrow, we’re in total Limbo.

From hotel, to guest room, to housesitting stint, we drift onward, among persistent rumors of big airplanes, distant continents and superior pretzels. But in the meantime, we have no roots, and our household has been reduced to the contents of a half dozen boxes and a lawless suitcase. An assortment of digital devices are strewn across coffee tables and countertops, and a zip-loc bag full of cables is dumped in the center of the room in an endless effort to keep these devices charged and connected.

Of these few vital possessions that remain, it’s probably safe to say that about 20 percent of them can be considered lost—or at least severely misplaced—at any given time. Ordinarily, this might come a source of great frustration, but I guess it’s just business as usual when you’re in escrow. Business as usual for the Hornaday family, as we prepare to venture into the wild blue without a net, with no direction home.

There’s no telling where we’ll end up, and at this point, it’s hard to say even where we’ll begin. Dropping out of society, the school system and the job market, to wander the European Union for twelve months, this has been our dream for several years. But we also recognize that in many cases the starry-eyed anticipation can end up being a bit more wonderful than the nail-biting reality.

The closer we get, the more aware we become of certain logistical obstacles, not the least of which include finding a host family willing to put up with our eclectic family of granola-crunching Californians; arranging transportation to and from airports that can accommodate our year’s worth of luggage and a pair of kids’ carseats; and choosing between registering for residency or simply wandering the countryside like undocumented gypsies, undercover homeschoolers.

As for now, we satisfy ourselves with steady progress, slow but sure, towards our new world disorder. Escrow is scheduled to close in two days, and we finally have reservations for our flight from SLO to Frankfurt on May 2nd. So we put our faith in the Lords of Limbo that the details will work themselves out, and that the good guidance of Fortuna will take us where we need to go.