I’ve been wanting to make a post about snowbirding for a while now, but I held back because there were so many thoughts I wanted to include and it would take a lot of work to put them all together into a coherent whole. Today I came across One Thought that changed my mind.
Here is one thought about snowbirding that I’ve had for a while. It’s that the typical idea of a snowbird as a person who maximizes their consumption to achieve a desired lifestyle—who has two houses full of stuff, only one of which is occupied at a given time—leaves room for the possibility of its counterpart. A reverse snowbird: someone who lives with minimal expense by occupying the undesired spacetime coordinates left vacant in the wealthy snowbird’s pursuit of comfort.
As much as I appreciate the Sonoran desert’s mild winter, and recoil at the thought of returning to struggle against subfreezing temperatures, ice and snow, there is a part of me that wants to embrace those challenges, face the heat again under the burning summer sun of the desert, and occupy this little known and mostly unexplored path in life.