The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (17 page)

Similarly, Hugh and Annie became my advocates, taking me to the emergency room or to the hospital when I had surgery. I’ll never forget Annie sitting with me after I’d had a heart procedure that hadn’t gone so well. The doctor had tried to use a laser to burn away a bit of the interior of my heart’s left ventricle, flash-frying it so it wouldn’t conduct an electrical current that would in turn reduce the number of extra, misfired
heartbeats. It hadn’t gone as planned, and he had given up before placing me in any greater harm; and I had started crying when I learned that nothing had changed. My heart was still broken, and
that
broke my heart even more. I curled into a small ball in my hospital bed as Annie sat with me, crying nearly as much as me. After a few minutes, she asked if I wanted to see how she sometimes handled her disappointment.

“Ya,” I answered, thinking she’d pick up the nearby bowl of Jell-O and jab it with a fork.

Instead, she stood up, closed her eyes, and started tap-dancing. She had studied dancing in New York, and she knew what she was doing, stuttering her feet and keeping her arms near her sides, tense, like she was reliving a moment when she’d been caught up short by a grade-school bully. She danced in one spot like that for a minute or so, moving her feet so methodically I could feel the heel strikes and toe-taps pass across the hospital floor into the bed, the mattress, my body, my toes. I could feel what she felt, and then her body changed. Her feet moved even faster and kicked higher, and her chest expanded so she could windmill her arms as she slowly turned in a circle, tapping away until a smile peeked out below her closed eyes, and then a bigger smile, like a balloon lifting off the floor, bigger and bigger until she threw open her eyes and excitedly looked at me, spun around, and closed with a loud “Ta-daaaa!”

It was so fantastic, it made me laugh even as I lay there disoriented and confused.

There were a lot of logistical questions when I first moved into the backyard: Where should I set the house, park my car, get mail, and stash my ever-changing array of “found” items: wood scraps, a light-up Santa, and other riprap that seemed to easily float in and out of the garage? These things were easy to sort out, like figuring out how to engineer a little house to drag it down the highway. You sort through the options, collaborate, and make a decision.

Other issues were more nuanced, and even though I don’t want to beat you up with my comparisons, those sticky wickets were very similar to learning that a rafter tail will split if you don’t drill a hole before screwing it into the wall. Some things you learn through trial and error, or by repeatedly using your body until it grows its own muscle memory and no longer needs your brainy guidance to know how best to hold a nail gun.

When I first moved into the backyard, I was completely flummoxed by which was better: knocking and then opening Rita’s door with the house key she had given me, or knocking and waiting for her to rise out of her chair like an old ship being raised from the deep dark sea. She’d eventually get to a standing position, steady herself, and then reach for her tripod
cane to begin the process of walking around the kitchen table to the front door—a journey no less epic than rounding Cape Horn. Meanwhile, I would stand on the other side of the door, worrying that I shouldn’t have bothered her in the first place.

It became easier to knock, pause for a second, and then walk in saying, “Candy Gram!” I still do that, all these years later, whether Rita is listening or not.

We discovered how to keep the peace: how I shouldn’t draw water from Rita’s tap before eight in the morning because the pipes would hum and wake her up, and how RooDee shouldn’t be out at four in the afternoon because, apparently, she liked to scare the mailman by behaving as if she wanted to rip the logo off his letter bag, shirt, hat, and back pants pocket.

Hugh, Annie, Rita, and I saw each other nearly every day, but it didn’t feel like my house was an extension of theirs, like an outdoor bedroom or apartment. I was autonomous—a close neighbor, who also took showers at Rita’s, stored ice cream in her freezer, and watched
Wheel of
Fortune
with her. Somehow we all found our place, and figured out how to share what we had.

Just now, writing this, it sounds lovely (and it has been), but there have been weird moments. One time, when Kellen was about eight years old, I took him to baseball practice and ended up lounging around on the grass with him and his baseball buddies, waiting for the coach to show up. We were shooting
the shit about how fast we could run if we had giant Slinkys strapped to our shoes, when one of the boys suddenly looked at me and suspiciously asked if I was Kellen’s aunt.

“Well, no,” I said calmly, smiling. “I just live in the backyard.”

He pondered this for a minute and then belted out in shock, “Oh my God, you’re one of the homeless people!” He said it innocently and emphatically.

Kellen and I simultaneously went to bat with explanations. “She has a house in the corner,” he said.

“It’s really cute and nice,” I offered, using a schoolteacher tone, “and I live there with a Keebler Elf and several small woodland creatures. It’s actually quite lovely . . . well, except for the squirrels. They have terrible gas—perhaps a dietary issue. Their nuts give them gas.”

The kids looked at me for a minute, and then all of us burst into laughter. I drove home later, pondering the kid’s comment about my being homeless. It stung, and made me feel that I needed to explain something about myself, like living in the backyard was a bad thing. But it didn’t feel that way, and in fact felt like one of the best living arrangements I’d ever had.

In all these years, there haven’t been lingering hard feelings: no big arguments brewing, no power plays or hierarchy that need shuffling every once in a while. Instead, we all get along incredibly well for close-quartered neighbors, with the occasional disagreement about minor things.

This is what Rita and I argued about: the sweetness of cinnamon (I know, a very big issue indeed). I swore cinnamon was savory not sweet, and Rita swore she knew better. I’ll never forget storming out of her house, seriously offended by her getting in the way of my baking, as an apple pie dotted with sugar and cinnamon baked away in her oven. She had screeched “Ack, ack, ack” like I was sprinkling acid on the pie, like she was personally being injured by my cinnamon. It bugged the shit out of me. It was my pie, and she didn’t get to say shit about it!

“Man-o-man,” I had said later, “you really pissed me off.” And then Rita had said, “Oh. Hummm. Yes, I can see that.”

As it turns out, we were both right. A few days after the argument, I looked up cinnamon on the Internet and discovered that it’s both sweet and savory; it can go either way. And for years, we’d tease each other, saying, “Oh my, don’t want a repeat of the cinnamon incident,” when we’d feel ourselves on the verge of an argument.

Most arguments look ridiculous when you put them on paper; this one is no different.

Over time, Home became something defined as much by my house as by the way Rita would call me at six o’clock to see if I wanted to watch the news; by how every December, a Christmas tree would arrive on the top of Hugh and Annie’s small
car, picked and pruned by Keeva and Kellen, and then be set up in their living room like a giant schnoz on the face of a small man. Home became the place I most wanted to be when I was feeling good or bad, busy or lazy, confused or clearheaded. Home was where Rita lived; it was Hugh and Annie’s house, the carport, the driveway, the fir tree, the garbage bins, the wind that came out of the south and smashed into my house, and the smell of cedar that still wafts out of my loft even after almost a decade.

C
urrently, I keep my camping knife in the drawer near the stove; it sits there with five other pieces of silverware, an oven mitt, a spatula, a can opener, and a box of matches. Nearby I keep three coffee cups, a couple of plates, and a tin of birdseed; there’s also a decorative sugar bowl shaped like a monkey head, and a platelike toaster with little arms that rise up to hold bread over an open flame. Everything has a purpose or tells a story (or both), like the way I got the toaster as a birthday present from a friend and was so excited to use it that I immediately plopped it on the stove with two slices of bread, blabbing about how this was the best present ever and, my God, this is genius, while my friend sat on the couch and smiled very big. I continued to flip the hot bread for twenty minutes, waiting for it to turn brown, but all it did was melt part of the twisty
knob for my stove and curl the bread like an old shoe. This compelled my friend to bang his “toast” on the countertop, denting it, which threw us into hysterics. I’m saving the toaster to give it back to him in a few years, when he needs a little lift in his day and wants to remember how funny it is to fake-bite bread and pretend your teeth have broken.

It’s weird to take stock of what you keep and what you let go of. I recently counted and categorized all my stuff, and discovered that I have 305 things, ranging from my toothbrush and silverware to my truck and all the crap that seems to have accumulated in the glove box. The list invited all sorts of contemplative high jinks, where I sincerely marveled over the brilliance of my multitool pocketknife and the way I could use the scissors, or open a bottle, cut cheese, or even break out of prison with it. I puzzled over why we say “pants” instead of “pant,” and whether I got to count sock pairs (clearly two items) as a single thing. I wondered why I still held on to my pig-shaped pepper shaker after he had fallen off the counter and shattered into a dozen irreconcilable pieces. I had glued him back together the best I could, and he leaned lumpily next to his pig-shaped partner, the saltshaker.

I found myself staring at the list and wondering what Sherlock Holmes would deduce about the person who owned all this stuff. Occupation, hobbies, gender? I suddenly felt incredibly self-conscious, recognizing that if I made a pie chart of possessions, most of the pie would be filled with burly things: jigsaws,
camping gear, unsexy long johns, and the like; and one small sliver would be dedicated to what some people would call normal lady things (panties, bras, a dress, a skirt, two necklaces, seven ponytail holders). What kind of woman was I, and what would others say if they knew the last gadget I bought (a spontaneous purchase) was a six-inch drop hitch, a heavy slug of metal designed to connect a trailer to a truck?

My point in all of this is that a little self-awareness can lead to a lot of self-conscious prattling, which is a perfect springboard for tossing the list aside and going for a walk.

A few years ago, my mom and I were talking about how we either keep or let go of things, and agreed that she was more of a “hanger-on-er” than me. This discussion came up after an argument about me giving away a camera that she had given me, and how could I let go of things so casually? The camera was a Nikon, a fancy professional deal that had been my grandfather’s, one he had picked up in Japan, and it had passed along to my mom when he died. My mom had gifted it to me, and later I had gifted it to my sixteen-year-old niece. And in the end, my mom felt I’d betrayed her in the deepest way possible . . . like I’d given up on her and not the camera.

My mom saw me as cavalier and reckless, a compulsive “let-er-goer” in our conversation and I viewed her as a neurotic hoarder. How else could I explain the way my mom has shelves full of pinch pots, crayon drawings, and odd little knickknacks that my siblings and I created in grade school? As I talked to
her on the phone, I could imagine her basement, full of boxes: old report cards, newspaper clippings, wedding announcements, and blurry photos showing my dad holding me as a baby, pulling cake out of my brother’s hair when he was a toddler, smiling at my sister minutes after her first baby was born, and standing awkwardly beside me with my car loaded to the gills the day I left the Midwest and moved to Olympia. Who else but a hoarder would hang on to the stuffed animal that her mother once gave her, to her father’s spectacles and his Bible, to scrapbooks filled with photos of relatives no one remembers.

Regardless of how I wish it weren’t true, my mom was right in our argument: I had regifted her camera and felt fine about it. I was a let-er-goer and she was a hanger-on-er, but that doesn’t mean I don’t lean into her territory every once in a while.

Among the extremely useful things I store in my house is a six-inch neck scarf, a gift from Kellen—something he had promised me in a Christmas card, written in his classic seven-year-old print: “I love you. I well give you a scarf.” Months later, he walked up to me and out of the blue threw a piece of orange knitting at me (a short, thin piece, like a special key fob). “I got tired,” he offered.

I’m holding on to the scarf so I can wear it to his future college graduation, or some other event that honors Kellen Hugh MacNally, where I can be the strange lady in the back row with an orange key fob safety-pinned to her blouse. And if ever asked to propose a toast, I can stand proud, holding
my tie/key fob and explain how he had saved my sense of well-being the day he told his friend I wasn’t homeless.

So I’ve held on to Kellen’s scarf and a small window elf that was felted by a friend’s four-year-old. I have a box of seashells, a silver dollar, and a buffalo nickel. I have one of my dog’s baby teeth, a clay button that goes to the first sweater that my friend Beth knitted, and a pair of climbing shoes that are held together with duct tape. Those shoes remind me of who I used to be; how I’d gladly load into a car at ten o’clock at night, heading out to the crags with my friends, where we’d drive half the night and then sleep for a few hours at the trailhead, like kittens, in the back of the car. We’d push ourselves through the day, sweating and grunting, and hanging by our knuckles as we attempted overly ambitious, nasty climbs called something inane like “Kiss of the Crowbar.” I was strong and eager, and willing to drag myself (and my shoes) on any number of epic weekend adventures.

Now I am less eager, and like it or not, I mostly wear my climbing shoes when I walk up the ladder to clean the neighbor’s gutters. But there’s some psychology involved; I find myself braver and younger when I’m cleaning the roof.

I haven’t done much redecorating over the years. I have the same bamboo blinds and the same wool rug that collects dog hair like it’s spun out of Scotch tape, the same pillows, and the same wicker basket full of camping gear, down booties (a winter necessity), and Kellen’s six-inch neck scarf. I’ve held on to
a few mementos, but much more has come and gone. I’ve ushered in new jeans, T-shirts, coveralls, dish towels, eyeglasses, a pair of pumps, some underwear, tennis shoes, flip-flops, socks, a bath towel, and coffee cups that seem to want to launch themselves off the edge of the porch at the slightest provocation (a slight problem with living in a house that bounces on a set of springs). For the most part, when something new comes in, something old goes out.

A few years ago, I splurged and got a new bed. The old bed—one I used for three years—was a gift from some friends in Portland just before I finished the little house and they left town. They had packed everything up, winnowed their stuff down to a small crate that was being shipped to Hawaii, and then wandered into their backyard to address what couldn’t fit: ornamental bowling pins, yard art, picnic tables, and the like. In the end, I was asked to babysit a lawn chair and a giant grasshopper welded out of old lawn mower blades (art that was lighter and less bulky than the metal moose welded out of an old acetylene tank and bicycle parts). I figured the yard art would be easy enough to plant in the yard wherever I went. The lawn chair was more challenging, so I parked the metal foldy part in a friend’s garage and kept the cushion to create a bed for my loft.

The lawn chair cushion worked fairly well. It had a low profile and was lightweight, so I could easily drag it up the ladder into the loft. I felt like a genius for improvising such a
supreme bed: my blankets fit perfectly when I folded them in half, and there was plenty of room to fit me and my dog as long as she slept behind my knees and I slept on my side (which I normally do). For the first year or so, things were fine, but then things changed.

RooDee decided to park herself in the geographic center of the bed, never to the left or right, or down near my feet, or off on the exposed wood platform, but in the dead center of the bed. This left me sleeping like a tube sock on the thin side of the mattress, sleeping until I’d wake up and argue for space with my dog, hip-checking her, and groggily harrumphing around until I could fall back to sleep on my little cotton swab. I put up with this for a while, pacifying myself that I was still a rough-and-tumble adventurer, able to sleep on her backpack or make a pillow out of a wad of dry leaves shoved in a T-shirt. Surprisingly, the little mind game worked (I wasn’t miserable, nor was I happy) until I woke up one morning with my ass crack on backward, as my brother once said; feeling like someone had hit me in the kidneys with a bowling ball, with a stiff lower back so painful that I had to crawl on my knees to put on my socks and shoes. So I broke down and decided to splurge on a new bed.

As a side note, I have to admit that I was also getting a lot of guff from my friends for “sleeping single in a single bed,” as derided in a horrible ’70s song. They were encouraging me to double up, “to get out there and live a little.” “If you build it,
they will come,” my friends had promised, and then broke into peals of laughter.

So I found a local company to make a wool mattress for me, something a few inches thick and the size of a double bed, and easy to pull up into the loft or drag out for spring-cleaning. According to my research, wool was a perfect material: grown by local farmers on the backs of happy sheep, “eco-friendly, creating a micro climate that is restorative and practically medicinal,” as it said in one ad. I was sold, and figured this was an awesome investment, even though it was hard to believe a mattress should cost four hundred dollars.

The wool mattress factory was on a farm just outside town, and as I drove down the gravel driveway, I was positively giddy. I couldn’t wait to heft my normal-size mattress into the back of the truck and up into the loft.

I walked into the factory and asked about my mattress, exclaiming that this would be “the best bed ever” and “Man-o-man, isn’t this a great factory,” and a few minutes later a woman walked out of a back room holding a cardboard box the size of a baby chair. I was crushed, and stared at the box. My lips quivered and I almost cried.

“This is a wool topper, meant to slide over your mattress,” the lady explained.

“But I don’t have a mattress. I mean, I have a mattress but it is more like a seat cushion, and the word
cushion
is more of a suggestion than a reality.”

She pulled out my paperwork and explained how I had purchased a topper. “It goes on TOP of the bed,” she explained again, sandwiching her hands together and smiling.

I half smiled while holding back tears, and numbly walked back to the truck.

On the way home, I stopped at a store and bought a piece of memory foam. I hated doing this; I had inspected the factory where memory foam was made and had watched as giant loaves of the stuff squirted out the ass end of a machine, ballooning out of a series of pipes and chemical tanks into a pillow the length of a football field. From there, the mass was sliced like a loaf of bread into two-inch-thick mattresses that were wrapped in plastic, sealed, boxed, packaged, priced, and shipped all over the world.

“I thought my wool would be puffier,” I told the memory foam salesclerk.

The saleslady nodded like she’d heard it all before, and I got in my truck and nearly cried. I hated my new bed.

When I got home, I pulled the foam out of its box and stretched it out on the back fence so it could bake in the sun and off-gas. It smelled a little funky, like the waiting room at the dentist’s office, but not horrible. I sat in a lawn chair across from the foam and tried to make peace with it, and to imagine what people did in the old days when their back would crap out and the miracle of toluene diisocyanate, or TDI as they called it at the memory foam factory, didn’t exist. I replayed the
inspection that I had done at that factory, the way the chemicaltanks had emergency backups for the shutdowns, and turn-offs for any overflows. It was all very sophisticated, metered, measured . . . safe. And the end result was a soft and squishy wad of goo that, at this moment, even as it hung across the fence like a wet noodle, looked like the sort of thing that would help my back heal. “God,” I mumbled, “I need a night of sleep!”

This was the sort of bargaining and reasoning that I did with myself more than a thousand items: the vehicle I drove to work, the wool rug in the great room, the propane I used to cook, pillows, Q-tips, toilet paper, coffee, the Christmas wreath I hung on the door, the shampoo I used, and food . . . bananas, beer, bread, asparagus in the middle of winter. All of my choices have been messy and inaccurate . . . and humbling beyond words.

As far as the bed went, a day after stretching the wad of polyurethane over the fence, I had a bed—a grown-up bed, with acres of luxurious padding that could be navigated by my dog and me, and a special someone if that ever happened.

And it did, and has. Just saying.