The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (20 page)

I fell asleep on RooDee’s blanket and woke up with dog hair stuck to my upper lip like a crazy press-on mustache. So I went into Rita’s kitchen to wash it off and drink a beer. Everyone was gone; Hugh, Annie, and Kellen were at a soccer game. Keeva was in Africa, and I was alone. I couldn’t even watch TV—it was time for the six-o’clock news, but the TV cable got turned off when Rita died, so I couldn’t watch Brian Williams, Mr. Weepy Eyes as Rita called him (a name he earned by looking like he was going to cry at any minute as he reported on the world’s mayhem and missing goodness). So instead, I decided to drink my beer and mope around, and generally feel sorry for myself on this, my first day as an orphan.

I am a creature of routine. Maybe most of us are . . . we wake up, hop in the shower, make a cup of coffee, make breakfast and a bit of lunch; we wake up our kids, kiss our spouse, and let the dog out for a pee. We go to work, punch a clock (even if it is metaphorical), and chip away at our day. And in the meantime, we come to know a little bit about the neighbors, the lady at the coffee stand, the bus driver, and the guy across the street who is probably running an illegal chop shop because he’s up late at night with a torch, cutting up cars in his driveway (and even though I believe in freedom and the Declaration of
Independence, I am really annoyed by his tendency to use a ball-peen hammer at one in the morning). But even inside the stuff that bothers us, even inside the banality of so much of our day, we appreciate that everything is predictable and safe. Everything is clear, and you can navigate around the things that bother you and steer toward the things you love. And then someone dies and fucks the whole thing up.

Clearly, given my use of cuss words, I am mourning. Earlier, I’d thought about wearing black like Johnny Cash for the rest of my life. But everyone in the Pacific Northwest wears black—black raincoats, black hoodies, black jeans. And besides, black doesn’t really describe how I feel; I am far more empty than full of tar. I feel like if I move too quickly, my shoulders will fall down and hit my kneecaps because the stuff in between is just air. So it is important that I sit very still in the backyard and do nothing, which causes me to notice there are a thousand different birds picking around at the fur that RooDee deposited in the strawberry patch. And it’s easy to see that the day is perfect (not too hot and not too cold, and not raining or misting or threatening to move my pity party inside). RooDee would have loved this day just like every day, and likely wouldn’t have put up with me moping around for long.

I wasn’t just sad about losing Rita and RooDee themselves. I was grieving over every single pattern in my day-to-day that was now busted; how I couldn’t figure out how to take a shower without asking someone (maybe Annie or Hugh) for permission
to use Rita’s bathroom. It was a habit, no less powerful than the way gravity can drop you to your knees.

There are two things I don’t want to admit but will tell you as long as you pinky-swear not to tell anyone else and swear even bigger that you’ll never ask me about them even if we become best friends who talk about everything. So here goes: The day after RooDee died, I crawled under the bench in my little house and curled into a ball the size of my four-year-old niece. Once I was shoved in there, I scream-cried into a down bootie that was sitting nearby, so no one would hear me and no one would have to know how deeply disturbed I was feeling. I kept my head down and hands over my head like a tornado was about to rip through my house (and it felt like that could happen at any moment), but it didn’t and instead I ended up pulling a muscle in my abdomen, crying and blowing snot all over my down bootie. I cried like that for a half hour, and then the storm passed and I crawled out and drank some water like nothing had happened and I was normal again.

The second thing I did (and again, this is just between us) was punch the ceiling of my house very hard. I punched it five or six times while I was lying in the loft, crying about how the last time I had come to the loft everything was different. Rita was alive. RooDee was with me.

The few weeks since Rita had died, I had been sleeping downstairs because RooDee needed to get up a thousand times in the night, pacing around, shifting her weight trying to get
comfortable, and I was afraid she’d launch herself off the sleeping platform so had started sleeping downstairs on a lawn chair cushion.

So there I was: comfortable in my “real” bed with the quilt that my mom made, and the skylight window over me showing how the moon really does sometimes look like a banana, which is funny and I would have said it out loud, and RooDee would have ignored me and instead would have sighed and scooted her butt farther into my knees. But RooDee was never going to do that again, so I punched the wood ceiling five or six times very hard while I cried.

I woke up in the morning with my knuckles scraped and bruised. Every time I reached for my coffee cup I felt embarrassed, ashamed at losing my shit in a way that included punching a four-thousand pound object. “Who does that?” I wondered.

Grief makes normal behavior a real pain in the neck, like the day after RooDee died and I went to get a pizza. I ran into a friend who asked, “How ya doing?” And I just stared at him, not sure how to respond: Should I go with “Okay and not,” or maybe “Okay, and I feel like my heart is the size of a pebble, sitting at the bottom of a very deep, very dark well”?

“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.

(PORTLAND, OREGON, AUGUST 2013)

I
n 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:

1. How many minutes can I abide the moon staring at me through the skylight?
   
2. What is the name of the bird that sounds like a broken shopping cart wobble-wheeling around the backyard so early in the morning?
   
3. 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?
   
4. What happened to the neighbor’s cat?
   
5. 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?
   
6. 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?
   
7. 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).
   
8. 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.