The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (11 page)

“And,” I continued, “you’ve got a lot of wood up here that might be putting some stress on the old girl, so you might want to think about moving it.”

“Oh, that’s the stuff I got when Cathy and I first built this place, back when your house and mine were nearly the only ones on this block. Back when there was a milking barn where the music store sits,” he muttered.

“Humm,” I offered.

“Maybe you could move it down here? Maybe use it on your little shed?”

“Well . . . I guess so,” I offered, while inside screaming
Jackpot!
and dreaming about how it would feel to have five-hundred-year-old trees—beautiful trees, Oregon trees—wrapped around my house. I’d have preferred to stand in the living forest that begat that stack of lumber—the way a big forest like that filters the light, and everything smells damp and earthy, and it seems like every molecule is breathing—but that wasn’t up to me, so I’d be grateful to settle for the next-best thing: the most stunning beveled siding I’d ever seen.

“You fix that rafter and it’s all yours.”

I hopped down the ladder and raced home for a car jack and some wood to repair his roof, cackling, “Pinch my ass, I’m dreaming!” I never saw this coming—the little house was working its magic, connecting me to people and materials I never would have guessed would find their way into the picture.

I had to spend a lot of time remilling the old cedar so it would match up with the new wood from the lumberyard, and like a total nutball, I spent an entire precious day resawing the thin (two-inch-wide) cedar that I’d ripped off the siding so I could make it into usable window trim. It worked, and years into the future, I still love sitting in my living room, looking up at the skylight and seeing the kerf marks on the old cedar that outlines the window.

I
spent all of June and half of July mostly working alone, never taking a weekend off, jumping out of my car the minute I got home from work during the week. Over time, my little house and the “blondie on the roof,” as one passerby described me, became something of a neighborhood spectacle. One day, a complete stranger stopped as he was driving by because he saw me carrying one of the skylight windows up to the roof. He parked his car, threw an extra ladder up next to me, and started working, explaining that he was on his way to see his mom, who lived in the retirement home down the street. “She’d give me an earful if I told her I saw you crawling up a ladder in flip-flops and I did nothing to save you from killing yourself.” It was a comment that could have seemed condescending, but this kind man was serious, and he was helpful.

I’ve never been good with asking for help; it seems risky, but at some point when things are really dicey, your stubbornness gives way to a certain form of humility that, after you get over yourself, feels liberating. I started to believe that the universe was conspiring to help me finish my house, sending people along at the right moment. I never learned that man’s name, but I was certain he happened along at a time that saved my life or the life of the skylight that now sits over the great room. Either way . . . he did his mother right. Halfway up the ladder, my defibrillator had started firing, causing me to suddenly lean my head into the window glass and clutch the entire unit with the ladder in a bear hug. I was frozen, waiting for the storm to pass, and when I saw that second ladder slam against the roof next to me, I knew that whatever happened next, it was going to be all right. I was safe.

Sometimes the word
gratitude
feels too thin to explain things, and I started to cry, then almost immediately giggle like a ten-year-old, when we finally got the window in place.

Another time, a traveling salesman (a twenty-year-old college student selling magazine subscriptions off his bike) rode over and collapsed his wares on the nearby lawn. We chitchatted, with me on the roof and him lying back on the grass, sipping water; we discussed the little house, how it was built, and what I planned to do with it. “Are you gonna live in it?” he asked, leaning up on his elbows. I stopped what I was doing and pulled my sunglasses up on my head, looking
across the street at my big beautiful house. The chocolate mint was blooming near the lavender, and the small apple tree in the front yard was positively beaming with its first baby fruit—a green apple the size of a chicken egg. The fir tree was shadowing the left side of the house, and the sun was glinting off the window on the right, making the house look like it was winking at me.

“I’m selling my big house over there”—I nodded across the street—“and building this.”

“Oh,” he said, glancing over at the house; it seemed to look to both of us like the best place in the world to take a nap. “That’s cool,” he offered, and then went on to tell me about always wanting to live in a beach cabin, where you’d cook up whatever fish you caught during the day, when you weren’t surfing and, “y’know, having fun,” and at night you’d sleep listening to the waves roll in.

“That sounds sweet,” I offered with a quick smile and a deep breath. “Hey, I gotta make a little noise here. Soak up the sun for me.” And with that I went back to my drill and impact driver, installing the metal roofing and chewing my lip as I went because I had just admitted for the first time that I was going to sell my house.

There was a part of me that must have thought I’d get tired halfway through the building; I’d blow myself out, pull up short, and call it quits, and then I’d go back to life as usual. But that hadn’t happened. I had worked my way through a thousand
problems, like when the tar paper bulged on the corners so I used a strap wrapped around the whole house and ratcheted it tight to attach the trim; I had figured that out without using a book, and that was just one of a bunch of ideas that had saved the day. I liked it; I was falling in love with the way my knees knew how to hold a piece of plywood halfway up till I could grab the underside with my hand. I liked the way the little house was taking shape, and the way it seemed to double-dog dare me to step in . . .
move
in.

I had been thinking about it for weeks, and had even sent a few “feelers” to friends in Olympia, propositioning them by saying, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I finished my house and then moved into your backyard, ha-ha?” And just now, talking about it with the salesman, I realized that was just what I wanted. Maybe.

A week later, I took the weekend off to attend the wedding of John, my old housemate. John and I had lived together for three years as he worked his way through college and then into a doctoral program, and then he was off to the races once he fell in love with Brenda. They had lived in Washington, D.C., for a short while, then came back to Seattle, and now they were getting hitched.

I arrived at the rehearsal dinner wearing flip-flops, a sunburn, and a Hawaiian dress, feeling a little like someone who had just been rescued off a desert island and couldn’t remember how to sip water out of anything but a coconut husk. I
remember laughing with John and Brenda, their parents, and other friends, but all the while I was thinking about the little house at home. I behaved like a new mother, showing off photos of my half-finished house and entertaining friends with stories about the way I’d glued my hair to the house and nearly shot myself off a ladder using a drill to fight off a bee.

“Shut the front door!” John had laughed, using the nearly naughty F-word phrase we had often spit out when we were amazed by something. “I love that,” he cackled as I blathered on about my adventure.

Later that night, I settled into a sailboat that Brenda’s folks had loaned me so RooDee and I would have a place to sleep. The marina was beautiful with the moon reflected over the water and the halyards gently chiming off the masts, and the boat was ideal for holding me in my quandary. Sitting there in a space not much bigger than the shower stall at home, I made a list of pros and cons for selling my house. On the plus side, I could live debt free and in a house that would take ten seconds to clean. On the minus side, I would be giving up everything I’d worked so hard to achieve: a nice house and beautiful gardens, a sense of placement and home.

“Home . . .” I muttered out loud as I looked at my dog snoring next to me, paws occasionally flipping as she dreamed of running across an open meadow, chasing woodchucks. “And what is that but the place that when you go there, they have to take you in?” I offered this last part as I rubbed RooDee’s
belly, remembering Robert Frost’s poem about the hired man who returned to the place he felt most comfortable, just before he passed away. The question had been asked in a poem eighty years ago, and again now as I listened to seagulls muttering about dinner. What was the next-best place for RooDee and me?

I loved my house, but more and more I felt I didn’t belong there. It was the place where I slept. In the mornings, I’d spend just enough time there to take a shower, realize my clothes were still in the dryer, and race downstairs naked for fresh undies, a shirt, and pants before jaunting off to work. The rest of my waking hours I spent across the street, working on the little house. And my house was increasingly empty. My housemates Holly and Sam had moved out, dragging what they could in their suitcases to Hawaii; and my housemate Lisa spent more of her time at her boyfriend David’s house.

There was something missing for me, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. More and more, while standing in the living room, I felt like someone who’d just had a tooth pulled and was searching the open hole repeatedly with her tongue. I mentioned the idea of selling the house to a few friends, and mostly heard some version of “Why would you do that? It just started looking good.” And that was true. I had turned myself inside out working on the house, and had come to love it; at least, I supposed I loved it. Maybe it wasn’t love so much as a fear of losing everything I’d accomplished. I was afraid to let go.

Years ago, I’d gone skydiving with my friend Bryan. After
ten hours of training, we were loaded like eggs into a cardboard carton—I describe it this way because there were no seats, no seat belts or overhead compartments, no oxygen masks that would drop out of the ceiling should the cabin experience a sudden drop in pressure; instead there was the thin plane casing wrapped around us like we were sitting in a metal colon, ready for expulsion. The twin-engine plane was so old and rickety that it seemed it would be a relief to fend for ourselves outside, even if “outside” was three thousand feet up. Bryan jumped first, waving at me and smiling as he flew past the tiny window where I was crouched at the back of the plane. After a few more people jumped, it was my turn. I worked my way out onto the wing strut, moving hand over hand, just like we’d been trained. I hung there gripping the aluminum wing, my feet dangling in space with the earth spinning slowly below me, leaving me imagining what my fellow humans were doing down there. I couldn’t even see them. Their cars, along with mine, stationed in the airport parking lot, looked like the aphids that regularly attacked my garden greens. Suddenly, I felt that I could suspend myself there for centuries; there was no way I was letting go of the fucking plane. I looked over at the jumpmaster who had taught the class and who was now sitting in the door of the plane shouting at me to “LET GO!” I shook my head back and forth, and stared straight ahead at the horizon. I felt calm and clearheaded. A few minutes later, I heard a clunking sound near my head. I looked back at the door. The
jumpmaster was holding a short stick, a sawed-off broom handle that he was banging on the wing a few inches from my fingers.

“LET GO!” he yelled again, and then slammed the stick on the wing.

I knew what he meant. He had kidded with us that if we didn’t let go at the proper moment, he would slap our hands with the stick, and we had all laughed because who would be silly enough to hang on when they should let go?

Finally, after a few minutes, I summoned the courage to let go. I arched my back, arms above my head like a cheerleader, and then watched as the plane turned into a tiny toy floating above me. The free fall was as exhilarating as it was terrifying, and once my parachute was deployed, the rest of the ride was beautiful, giving me a chance to see Puget Sound and Mount Olympus, and the multitude of forest, farms, and bogs that separated the two. It was like seeing your head finally connected to your feet for the first and only time. In that case, letting go was a blessing . . . everything turned out just fine.

In record time, with hardly any hard work—no hand wringing or paintbrush dabbing that normally goes with the territory—I sold the house to my friend Kimo. In a matter of a few days, we figured out the paperwork and arranged for her to move in—lock, stock, and barrel—on Labor Day weekend, about a month away, when I would load my truck and tow my little house and new life up to Olympia.

Boom. Just like that.

Right when I’d hatched this newer, more interesting plan for my little house (no longer a simple project but a soon-to-be home), my folks came to visit. They came to see me, my grandma, and other nearby family members as part of an elaborate plan where they’d also trailer a boat from the West Coast, where it was purchased, back to the Midwest where they lived. They had arrived the day before, Dad’s dream boat in tow, and had marveled at the progress I’d made on the little house; the roof was half done and looking spectacularly shiny, and the shell was sheathed in tar paper ready to receive the cedar siding. I walked them around, showing them the salvaged goods that I’d collected: the neighbor’s siding, the old door, the cedar floorboards, and a giant brass porthole that I planned to install in the aft gable wall. They were fantastically enthused, oohing and aahing at all the right moments.

And then it was time to get back to work. I thought I’d enlist my mom to help me pick up a load of cedar siding. We erected scaffolding on top of my tiny car, lashing an extension ladder to the roof rack and tying a red ribbon on the end for safety’s sake. Then we were off. The idea was to lay the extra-long cedar siding on top of the extension ladder to support it and keep it from sliding off my extra-short car. It was a brilliant idea, but a few minutes into the trip (and now on the highway), I realized that my mother and I were likely sustaining significant hearing loss due to the roar of wind whipping past the ladder rungs. We
weren’t bonding very well either, as we shouted over the roar and she tried to catch me up on the family gossip.

It went like this:

“SHE SAID, ‘GO TO HELL’?” I shouted at my mom, alarmed and wondering why my niece would say that to my dad.

“NO!” my mom yelled back. “SHE SAID, ‘GOING WELL.’” She looked at me like I was trying to start trouble.

I paused and frowned. “YOU’RE NOT GOING TO TELL?” This was such a weird conversation. What the hell was happening in my family?

And so it went for an hour.

My mom and I arrived home to find my dad and brother trying to shove my old queen-size futon mattress into the cockpit of the sailboat. I had offered my brother the futon, the couch frame that it rested on, some rugs, and anything else he wanted to take home, since I obviously wasn’t going to need this stuff in my new tiny house.

It was a fantastic idea except for the fact that the mattress kept getting hung up on the boat rigging and the guys were having a hard time squeezing the fluff past the extra-small galley door. My dad and brother were sweating and swearing, and my mom quickly hopped out of the car, looking relieved to be standing on firm ground. I started snickering, but quickly realized this was serious business.

“Just grab the damn edge!” my dad spat at my brother.

“There is no ‘edge,’” my brother shot back. “Fracking fracker!” He then punched the futon with his forehead.

When they finally shoved it through the door, my brother slapped it and cheekily said he was sure it would be easier to remove than it was to install. “It’ll be like delivering a baby . . . now how hard can that be?” He chuckled as my dad rolled his eyes.