“Great,” I offered, smiling big, and wished him well, then raced back to my car.
Grief makes gravity heavier and air molecules denser, so breathing is accomplished in a shallow, half-hearted way. The only nice thing—a helpful thing—was that I didn’t have to go to work for a few days (my boss said it was okay, probably because her mom had died not too long before and she likely behaved illogically herself). I also liked the fact that I sat around in the backyard for several hours doing nothing: not mowing the grass or pulling out my tools to make something, not writing or drawing sketches of the little houses I’m designing for my friends. I didn’t do anything but sit quietly and pay attention to the fact that my hollow chest was still beating. I was still alive and could see that the new normal wasn’t so bad. In fact, it was quite beautiful . . . and that made me feel like the empty inside was just as full as the empty outside, which wasn’t empty at all.
I took my crying and house punching to a therapist. She massaged arnica gel into my hand where the knuckles were bleeding and the big sandwich part was swollen, and told me she couldn’t imagine anything so sad as losing Rita and RooDee. She was so kind and helped me fill out my tiny body a little bit more, so when I left, I didn’t feel so much like a stick with a brain balanced on top.
Her ability to simply hold my hand even though I’d done an incredibly stupid thing (hiding under a bench and socking my house) was one of the kindest things ever.
That, and my friends Jenn and Kellie invited me to come over and hang out with their boys. Harlan is four years old and one of the coolest kids on the planet (we had pinkeye together a few years ago and it bonded us) and his little brother, Andre, is about four months old (no pinkeye yet). At one point, Harlan threw a dozen or so freshly laundered socks across the kitchen floor, which was followed by us pretending he was a vacuum. He lay on his back, giggling, and I made vrooming sounds while pushing and pulling him across the floor to pick up the socks.
Maybe this was my new normal. I told Jenn and Kellie about punching the roof and Kellie reminded me that the Maori people bash their teeth in with a rock when they’re grieving, an act that eliminates a lot of small talk and uncomfortable silences with strangers (everyone can see you’re in a bad way and you don’t have to suck it up and act normal, plus everyone likely has equally bad teeth, so you’d finally fit in). Maybe there wasn’t any shame in simply taking a poke at my house or perhaps using a pillow if there was a next time.
I chased Harlan onto the couch and then pretended I didn’t see him when I sat on him like a cushion. Then I pretended to fart on him and motioned like I was waving away a foul odor. And he thought that was one of the funniest things ever.
Later at home, lying in the loft alone and listening to the emptiness banging around the backyard, I cried some more. I cried lying on my left side, then my right, and then I opened the small window near my bed and cried while resting my head on the window jamb. It was exhausting work, and after a while I realized I had quieted just enough to hear the tree frogs. And the port downtown was stewing away with any number of generators and forklifts and hustle and bustle, and whatever the hell else they do that sounds like a distant avalanche. This is what RooDee listened to, lying in the strawberry patch; what Rita got when she leaned out her bedroom windows; and now what I had, curled into the loft at midnight. Everything had changed and nothing at all—home was still the place we all fell asleep, even if some of us were missing.
One More Thing
(PORTLAND, OREGON, AUGUST 2013)
In an hour, I’m supposed to get up in front of a couple dozen people and talk about how to build a little house. They’ve all paid money for this experience, perhaps borrowing from their children’s college trust or skipping meals for months to pay the workshop fee, so you can understand why I’m nervous. I worry that they’ll view me as flawed by the way I am walking with my toes balled up, holding the end of my flip-flop together with a wad of duct tape after my new, dear, sweet puppy, OluKai, chewed the crap out of it. She’s done the same thing to the bottom of my shirt and my pillow; meanwhile, the nearby rawhide chew toys, dog bones, and stuffed toys sit untouched.
A few years ago, I started a company with a friend, geared toward helping other people build—helping them understand that life in a little house isn’t necessarily simpler, but is layered with challenges that come in the oddest form. When I first moved into the backyard, I was reluctant to tell people where I lived, not because I thought it was illegal or amoral, but because I felt that they’d read something into it—they’d think I was broken and needed help, and was unable to live like a normal forty-year-old lady. I’m not sure when that little prejudice developed: thinking that people who live with others, long past their rabble-rousing youth, are shifty. It’s like learning that the man you love still lives with his mom. It makes you ask questions. I’d ask questions too, but these days my questions are different.
I think I’m more curious than I used to be—curious about why people live like they do and how they make sense of their time. Do they have neighbors who are tracking their movements in such a way that they’d know just the right moment to rush in after they’ve fallen? Do they see how the sun has made it like a champion around the world overnight, and that all day today we get another chance to be brave, to exercise our humanity with boldness and deft precision, even if it’s just in helping the old neighbor lady get her groceries into the house?
These are the questions I fold into our discussions of HTT tension ties, which I explain are “long metal brackets, capable of withstanding five hundred pounds per square inch of uplift.” Something I normally get to say without limping with a wad of duct tape underfoot.
In the years since I built my house, I’ve talked with a lot of people who are curious about similar things. They want to access their inner carpenter, to challenge themselves to build their own home, and to develop an innate sensibility that allows them to know the difference among sticks of cedar, fir, and oak simply by the way they smell. More important, they want to examine their lives, and discover what makes them truly happy, which leads them to reconsider how they want to live within a community.
If I were to create a list of all the reasons Rita called me over to her house, it would probably look like the reason people hire a plumber or a professional caregiver: unclog the toilet, fix the kitchen sink, stare at the hot water heater to understand why it seems to be failing, remove the toilet in the bathroom so there’s more room to maneuver a wheelchair, put it back; help pull up the adult diapers, dab ointment in the most sensitive, personal spots before the pull-up; talk about the adult personal spots with the same tone used for our discussion of the mailbox and how it needs to be repaired so it doesn’t slouch in its position near the fence.
Rita responded to my needs too, offering a shower, a washing machine, and a large kitchen sink where I could rinse the giant bowl of strawberries I’d just harvested from the garden. But the plumbing exchange wasn’t the reason our living arrangement worked; instead it was the way Rita and I would giggle at the commercials for Viagra that would blast into the living room while we were watching the evening news, and the way we would talk about Kellen’s baseball game while I was refastening the Velcro on her shoes.
If more people understood how nice it is to have a sense of home that extends past our locked doors, past our neighbors’ padlocks, to the local food co-op and library, the sidewalks busted up by old trees—if we all held home with longer arms—we’d live in a very different place. All over America, there’d be people living in the shadow of older people who know every word to the song “Fly Me to the Moon.” There’d be more people attending middle-school talent shows and walking quickly with warm bowls of soup from one house to another, so as to enjoy an impromptu dinner with others.
We wouldn’t feel so alone, no matter the size of our houses or our bank accounts, no matter whether we had good health or congestive heart failure.
We would begin to see that each moment presents an opportunity to relax, to notice that the wind has shifted and a storm is coming, or that our friend’s toddler has decided to wear dinner instead of eating it. We would see that each minute counts for something timeless and, if we want, we all can find our way inside these big, tiny moments. That’s my experience, anyway, and it seems to be what a lot of other people have found.
I’ve met lots of people who have decided to do something similar: downscale out of their big house into a modest, almost too-tight abode, where windmilling unused stuff out the door is one of the most cathartic things they’d ever done. Some have even built tiny houses similar to mine, or they’ve modified RVs, buses, boats, and New York City studios. And the end result, according to what they’ve told me, is that living with less stuff offers a sense of happiness that they didn’t even know they were missing; they discover that it’s cool to have time to volunteer to refurbish the vacant lot a few blocks away into a playground for kids.
I love those stories. I was gobsmacked when Tammy and Logan told me they wanted to move out of their already tiny five-hundred-square-foot loft apartment to a little house like mine. Similarly, Kate, who lived in a small apartment in San Francisco, wanted to build her own house, diving into carpentry with very little experience but no less chutzpah than Amelia Earhart over the Atlantic Ocean in a small plane, and navigating (like I had) the difference between a floor joist and a roof rafter until she’d constructed a perfect little house. In Kate’s case, she wanted to build a tiny house where she could come and go as she wanted, maybe hunkering on her parents’ blueberry farm for some period of time, helping them with the harvest, and living elsewhere at other times. Si, the local beekeeper, also wanted to discover his inner carpenter. He worked slowly through the building process, designing a house that reflected his environmental ethic and a desire to live lightly on the planet. In every case, these people wanted a sense of home that included the people and natural environment around them, even if nature was nothing more exotic than the squirrels balancing on the telephone lines in a busy urban neighborhood.
For me, the idea of living small has always involved being curious—taking a look at how my day-to-day is connected to the larger world around me, and to the delicate universe that sits between my ears and in my small body. So at four or five in the morning, as I’m lounging around in the loft, I’ll work on a list of things that I’m currently curious about—a list that I keep expanding and refining:
How many minutes can I abide the moon staring at me through the skylight?
What is the name of the bird that sounds like a broken shopping cart wobble-wheeling around the backyard so early in the morning?
How many people slept under the Fourth Avenue bridge last night? Were they safe, and are they in a place to get warm now that the sun is finally coming out?
What happened to the neighbor’s cat?
How many minutes is the average kiss? How many hours have I spent kissing? Is it okay to break the hours into minutes, seconds, moments, flashes—instants that carry just as much weight as the hour itself? Is it okay to apply the same logic to sitting on the beach at sunset; to listening to my sister laugh so hard she isn’t making any noise, just wheezing a series of zzzz-zzzz-zzzz sounds; and to sitting with my three-year-old niece in my arms, watching her slowly fall asleep and then begin to drool?
How many other people are reclining like me, and staring at the exact same clouds forming and re-forming into what, just now, appears to be a car full of pickles?
Next time I’m online, research what Wikipedia has to say about the four-hundred-year-old tree that lives down the block. It looked like it was doing toe-touches into the neighbor’s yard during the last wind storm. Also research: hawks that live in the median on the highway, dogs (non-chewing), clouds (all).
Whose idea was it that we should all get jobs, work faster, work better, race from place to place with our brains stewing on tweets, blogs, and sound bites, on must-see movies, must-do experiences, must-have gadgets, when in the end, all any of us will have is our simple beating heart, reaching up for the connection to whoever might be in the room or leaning into our mattress as we draw our last breath. I hate to put it in such dramatic terms, but it’s kinda true.
On those days, I’ll work on my list, thinking that then maybe I can fall back to sleep, but instead, I toss—left side and right—then lie flat on my back to stare at the knots in the wood ceiling. I’ve been doing this for so long that now I’ve come to recognize the knot patterns, and have made them into the eyes and nose, ears and round heads of an assortment of cartoon characters. This is the sort of imagination that develops after living with your head a few feet from a beautiful knotty pine ceiling; I’ve tried to explain this to would-be builders, so they can be prepared.
Later, I’ll grab OluKai (whom I’ve been calling “Oly” for short) and amble down the ladder to start the day. I’ll make tea, get dressed, and try not to notice that Oly has eaten an inch off my left pant cuff. And then I’ll launch myself into the backyard to start another day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d like to acknowledge the following people and entities. Without them, there really wouldn’t be a book.
Paul Hawken, who inspired me to use words other than tiny and big, and to write absolutely from the heart. And to my friends and family, who have encouraged me and who haven’t seemed to mind that I sometimes suddenly have to stop what I’m doing so I can jot down what they’ve just said, scribbling madly on a piece of paper—slips of paper they’ll be happy to know are largely incomprehensible because I’m usually laughing too hard later to read my writing.
Many thanks to my editor, Sarah Hochman, at Blue Rider Press; David Fugate of Launch Books; and my co-conspirator at Portland Alternative Dwellings, Joan Grimm. And more thanks than there are sticks of wood in Oregon to Jenn Berney, who somehow was able to edit this book while raising two children, working a full-time job, making soup, chopping wood, running a marathon, and making me understand that anything is possible . . . even, crazy as it sounds, writing a book.
And finally, deep bows to Hugh, Annie, Keeva, and Kellen, who have created a sense of home with me that has retooled my heart and made me . . . Me! Many blessings.
One final note: The events I’ve written about are real, but I’ve massaged the timeline a bit to accommodate the story. If you want the long-winded, properly timed version of things, you’ll have to take a road trip with me where we’ll both confess everything out of boredom and proximity.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dee Williams is a teacher and sustainability advocate. She is the co-owner of Portland Alternative Dwellings (www.padtinyhouses.com), where she leads workshops focused on tiny houses, green building, and community design. Dee’s story has been featured in numerous broadcasts including Good Morning America, National Public Radio, PBS, MSNBC, CNN, Der Spiegel, CBC, and NBC Nightly News. She has also been profiled or featured in hundreds of online blogs and articles, and in printed media including Time magazine, The New York Times, and Yes! magazine (cover story). A video of her day-to-day experience in the little house is currently on display at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., as part of the five-year exhibit House and Home. She lives in Olympia, Washington, with an overly ambitious Australian shepherd, and in the shadow of her dear friends’ house.
The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Page 20