The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (18 page)

All kinds of interesting things have come and gone in the little house: a taxidermy hawk, a small earthquake simulator, and that giant pair of red plastic clown shoes that I had previously
sent to my friend Chinn but then she mailed back to me, explaining that she wanted me to wear them to her wedding as her maid of honor. I even had my own personal oxygen generator for a while.

The generator was prescribed by my doctor, and was designed to compensate for the way my heart was underperforming. I’d been feeling tired lately, like it was a monumental effort to collect my dog and drag her up to the loft and an epic feat to walk us around the block in the morning. The plan was to crank this thing on at night, slip a lovely plastic cannula around my ears and up my nose, and suck away on pure oxygen, with the end result being spunk, vim, and vigor.

I went to a medical supply place to pick up the generator and tubing. A lady gave me a short tutorial while I was signing several waivers, offering a gentle “I hope your patient does well” at the end of her speech. I gave her a look like I was swallowing the wheels off the generator, then the desk between us, and then the building that housed at least seven other desks. “Thanks,” I offered, and turned to load the machine into the truck. A minute later, buckled up and a mile down the road, I sat at a stoplight and cried, glancing at the generator like a jailer who was marching me into solitary confinement.

Driving home, I remembered how Mark’s oxygen generator had whirred away day and night, pumping air into his dwindling lungs and reminding all of us (but especially him) that he was dying. And now I was doing the same. Or was I?

I pulled the unit into my house and tucked it in a corner, where it looked overly large and awkward. That night, I dragged the plastic tubing into the loft, flipped on the machine, and then crawled off to bed with my dog. The machine puffed away, vibrating and echoing inside my tiny house, and the nasal cannula slowly baked the inside of my booger holes until they dried up and bled.

The next night, I shoved petroleum jelly in my nose and wore a pair of small foam earplugs, but the racket still drove me nuts until I crashed down the ladder, shoved the unit out on the porch, and slammed the front door behind it. This created a small plumbing issue, as I had to snake the tubing from the front porch up the side of the house and through the loft window, but it worked; I slept, smirking at my own resourcefulness.

A few days later, I started to notice that my legs and arms felt jingly in the morning. Maybe it was the oxygen, but I supposed it was more realistically the constant vibration created by the whirling generator sitting on the porch. My house doesn’t sit on a foundation; there’s nothing to dampen the sway of big wind in the eaves or the rattle of machinery tapping away on the trailer frame all night. So I grabbed the unit and shoved it under the house, placing it in the dry gap below the trailer and the grassy pad below. This seemed smart and required only an extra ten feet of plastic tubing, to run from below the house, up
over the porch, across the siding, and through the loft window into my dried-up nose holes. Problem solved, and I actually slept a bit better.

A few weeks later, Rita asked how things were going with my “contraption,” and I acknowledged that it was less than a luxurious step up at the Beverly Hotel à la Tiny House. She laughed at that and a few minutes later, when I set her dinner on the TV tray in front of her, she reached out and tapped my hand—a gentle swish-tap that reminded me she understood.

Rita was the one with problems. While she had adjusted over the years to her limited mobility, she still relied on a wheelchair, a walker, a cane, a wood gizmo to hold her cards when we played poker, and the help of an assistant every Thursday to give her a bath. She had it rough, compared to many, and then her vision started failing, too. As she would say: “Macular degeneration . . . never saw it coming.”

My ability to talk with Rita was one thing—and it was fairly limited—but my desire to tell the neighbors why I had tubing laced around the front of my house was even further afield. So when the neighbor asked what kind of machinery I was running so feverishly through the night, if it was ”the air compressor for your nail gun,” I had deflected the question without much angst, offering: “Aw, geesh, you can hear that?”

This was where all my courage dried up—when I had a chance to divulge my big secret: “I have congestive heart
failure and am using an oxygen generator because that’s what sick people do, what weak and infirm people do as they try to string together longer, better days to spite shorter, more fucked-up expectations.” But instead, I laughed and told the neighbor that I’d dampen the noise.

That night, I wheeled the generator into the garage and stretched a new forty-foot length of tubing across the lawn, up the front steps, past the front of the house, and into the loft window. Finally, all I could hear was the
pssst
of air puffing out of the cannula, my lungs expanding and contracting, and my heart lub-dubbing erratically. I rolled on my back and cried, letting the tears roll back into my ear holes around the nasal cannula. “This is what it has come to,” I whispered. “What’s next?” My dog butt-checked me and curled into my hip, sighing deeply and breathing slowly.

A few weeks later, I took the generator back to the medical supply store. “Did your patient expire?” the woman asked.

“No,” I said, “not yet.”

I’m still alive and well, and my heart condition hasn’t lessened my desire for stuff. It’s no easier to navigate the sea of “need” that I feel when I walk into Target (or any other box store) than it was when I lived in my big house. I want things. I want to buy the entire fifth season of
The West Wing
, a package with seven or eight DVDs and hours of mindless television entertainment. I want to buy a new hat and a turtleneck sweater that will hide the wattle jangling under my jaw, and I want to
buy some cough syrup so I’ll sleep through the night without waking up to the rain on the roof. But I won’t do that, not today anyway.

My most recent purchase wasn’t a gadget (like the six-inch drop hitch), but something functional: underwear. Powerful underwear.

I had been feeling fragile, like I needed a secret weapon to deflect the mounting sea of fear that I’d been feeling about my health. So I purchased two pairs of panties. One had a cartoon of Wonder Woman printed on the fabric, and the other (a blue pair with red ribbing) simply carried a giant S on the front. Superwoman.

The very next morning, I woke up to a pair of firemen pounding on Rita’s back door. “Fire Department!” they yelled through the closed door.

I launched myself down the ladder and leapt into the backyard, wearing nothing but my Superwoman underwear and a T-shirt. The firefighters spun madly on their heels as I pounced out of what they thought was a toolshed sitting behind Rita’s house. I gave them a stern, knowing look as I ran past them toward the front of the house.

In the front yard, a few more firefighters were standing at the front door, and they too spun around, surprised by the powerful lady in her powerful underwear, bearing down on the door. It was slow motion: me racing in, giving them a look like
Follow me!
and then unlocking the door to allow the
firemen to stomp in on their own accord, as I charged through the house into Rita’s bedroom. I found her on the floor, collapsed under the weight of her body.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she screamed. “Dee, help me! I’m sitting on a box of Kleenex!”

The firefighters clamored in with their regalia of suspendered fire pants, overly large boots, and muscular man bodies. One of them gave Rita a quick exam, and then helped her back into bed as I fluffed her pillow and rearranged her blankets.

Rita perked up, surrounded by five or six firefighters and me in my panties. All of us stared at her, and that’s when we offered a collective sigh. Rita was okay. She had simply fallen out of bed and couldn’t get up; problem solved, danger averted. And that’s when I realized I was the odd man out, standing there in my undies. So I put my hands on my hips, framing the large S, and looked off toward a fake horizon. In a deep, booming voice, I said, “Well, I think my work here is done.” Then I grabbed one of Rita’s robes and thanked the firemen for their time.

Months later, I ran into one of those firefighters at the local pizza joint, who recognized me and laughed. “Oh my God, Superwoman, I’ve been telling that story all over town! How is Rita, anyway?”

T
here are very few opportunities to discuss your underwear in public. That’s what I told my friends Tammy and Logan as they finished setting their new tiny house in a friend’s side yard, nearly six years to the day after me. Their yard was in Portland, and as part of the package, they shared a washing machine and dryer with the big-house owners, a situation that had led Tammy to question her panties decorated like a Christmas package with reindeer and ribbon. “It’s all about getting comfortable,” I laughed, and then we turned to Logan and asked about his skivvies.

When I first moved in, I felt bombarded by the way nothing was my own anymore; the night crept in at three or four in the morning, rolling past the window sill and cuddling into the airspace between me and my pillow, and the dog and my breath.
It settled in and took over, and the same was true with the sound of Keeva and her friends, late at night and sitting in the nearby sauna.

We had constructed the sauna earlier in the summer, using salvaged materials that included an old Franklin stove that my boss had dragged to the Pacific Northwest from Louisiana. That stove was well over a hundred years old, and it still managed to heat up our tiny sauna, tucked near the garage, in a corner of the yard only thirty feet from my house.

Keeva and her friends had heated themselves into sweaty mush balls, sitting in the sauna gabbing about this and that (all I could hear was the occasional brah-ha-ha of laughter). They heated themselves until they couldn’t fathom another second in the tiny structure, and they exploded out the door, past the porch, and three steps into the snowy backyard, where they giggled and rolled in the snow like puppies.

All the while, I floated in and out of sleep, waking up long enough to hear one of the teenagers screaming that she had possibly frost-burned her “dant-ta-dant,” which was followed by “Your
what
?” and more peals of laughter.

There wasn’t any annoyance in that experience for me, even though I needed to get up early the next day and I wondered when I had become “the old lady in the nearby house,” as I imagined Keeva could have easily described me to her friends (but she didn’t . . . I was still just “Dee”). Those subtle (or not-so-subtle) interactions were the things that I missed when I was
traveling. I missed being home, including the sound of Kellen practicing his cello, Hugh laughing with a friend in the driveway, Rita cranking
Jeopardy!
up to nine thousand decibels, and the way bats would ping into the backyard at dusk. All of that and more made living in the backyard a bit magical.

I wouldn’t have it any other way, and so you might understand why I was freaked out when I learned that the city might want to put the kibosh on my situation. If they did, there would be no one to blame but myself. You see, a week earlier, an article about my house ran in the local paper, and someone (a complete stranger) had commented online, suggesting that I shouldn’t be allowed to visit the public library because I wasn’t paying property taxes while living in the backyard. The article only told the story of my house, and didn’t mention the way I help Hugh and Annie, and the way they care for me; or the way I sometimes have to traipse over to Rita’s house at two in the morning to move her box of Kleenex two inches closer to her, because they were out of reach and she needed them. No one wants to read about that kind of stuff in the paper, so this mean man (or woman) had assumed I was a squatter. In fact, he/she used that word just before explaining how people like me were undermining our economy.

So I had invited a city inspector to visit my house and see the backyard, and let me know what, if anything, was a problem. I didn’t think anything was problematic, but I wanted to hear from them—a move similar to a foreman calling me at
work, wanting to know if I could come by and see if there were any concerns with the way forklifts were moving spent solvent from one part of a building to another. In my experience, it was always better to be on the up-and-up than to be caught with your pants down.

Before that newspaper article, I hadn’t ever thought about whether or not the city would have a problem with my living in an area formerly occupied by thatching ants; I never thought about it being a concern for the neighbors, the local fire department, or tax collectors.

The City Lady showed up at noon, and I showed her my solar panels, my compost toilet, and how I collected soapy water under the kitchen sink. She took photos of my cookstove and the outside of the house, and scribbled notes as we talked. I giggled at the way I treated her just like some factory foremen treated me when they offered me coffee and donuts. I offered her fresh strawberries from my garden, and complimented her on her blouse.

We had a short, reasonable exchange, but ultimately, this is what I learned: The city viewed my house like a travel trailer, and the code prohibited “living in trailers.” So what was I supposed to do? There had to be a way around this.

My house was a hybrid, not quite a travel trailer or a regular house, and that made the city uncomfortable, not knowing which box to put it in. My house is also painfully small; it is nearly thirty times smaller than the average house in America,
smaller than a parking spot, smaller than some SUVs, and smaller than the square footage of tissue provided by a roll of toilet paper. And yet, somehow, it still feels more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.

I’ve lived in some odd places: in a woodshed behind my parents’ house during a stint when I’d returned home from college and didn’t want to go back. I’ve lived in a boat hut that was in a back pasture, alongside a lake that lapped up against the building foundation all through the night. I moved there just after I’d broken up with Rob, certain I’d find what I was missing by living with an axe and an outhouse, and ten thousand snow geese that would rise up off the lake when I’d throw open the door to pee in the middle of the night.

I lived in my van during graduate school while I was looking for a place to rent, and it was actually pretty fantastic except for the way I’d have to hop on my bike and ride up to the local McDonald’s (sometimes pedaling at great speed) to use their bathroom first thing in the morning. And then there was the assortment of apartments and houses that my friends and I rented, where we lived without heat or hot water half the time. In one house, I had developed the habit of heating my body by holding my shirt like a net over the open flame on the oven; I did that repeatedly during the day, through the rainy winter, until one day, as I looked out the window, daydreaming, I sparked my shirt on fire. My housemate ran over and tackled me like an action figure, screaming, “DROP AND ROLL,” as
she barrel-hugged me and rolled us together across the kitchen floor.

So how could the city have a problem with my house? Was there a safety risk, or a problem with sanitation, human health, or the environment? Was it just a matter of keeping the peace, so the neighbors wouldn’t imagine their property values plummeting because of the quaint view of the house “where the Keebler Elves likely slept”? (This was how a passerby once referred to my house, and after hearing that, I had yelled: “Simpler times, my friend, simpler times.”)

There was more to it than the walls and the way the stove worked, the quarter-inch tongue in grooved knotty pine, the purple heartwood so dense it made my drill bit smoke as I was installing it along the loft rail. There was more here than the way it still smelled like cedar, and the way RooDee made a cave under the house behind the big bushes that I planted near the steps, and snored happily there all day long; it’s bigger than the backyard and the fir tree, and the way I can drive down the alley, back in, and then reinstall those fence boards behind the house.

I wanted to tell the city inspector all about it, explain what I’d seen on the front porch at dawn and how the night before, Hugh, Annie, Keeva, Kellen, RooDee, and I had watched a movie outside on Rita’s patio, circling our chairs around the tiny TV screen and DVD player, and laughing as quietly as possible after Rita went to bed. I wanted to say a lot but wasn’t
sure where to start; people don’t want to hear about how your heart has melted into the dirt under your house, when all they want to do is take a few notes and get back to the office.

The inspector wrapped things up and thanked me for my time, in the same way I sometimes nod and say, “We’ll be getting back to you with our findings.” And sure enough, a few weeks later, Hugh and Annie got a letter from the city explaining how it was illegal to live in a travel trailer, but I could “recreate.”

“Umm, are they talking about my house?” I’d asked Hugh as I held the letter in a shaky hand.

“We can fight this,” he said. “March down there and make sure they understand you’re not living like that.”

“Like what?” I asked, starting to sweat.

“Like whatever”—he shrugged—“like everyone else who’s walked into the backyard and seen there’s something good here. This is good. Look, let’s address this logically.”

With that, we discussed our options: (1) I could formally “live” with Rita, but recreate in my house 99 percent of the time; (2) I could develop a petition and pay a fee to have my case heard before the city council; or (3) I could simply roll up the porch steps and find a place off in the woods far, far away from the city’s watchful eyes.

Number 1 was out, because Rita and I would argue about whether or not various soaps were spicy or sugary in their scent; our cinnamon discussion already proved that. Number 2 was
also out, because I couldn’t fathom spending days and weeks closed up in a watery little office with the city council. I’ve spent enough time in a gray-colored cubicle, stamping paper and reviewing reports; I couldn’t load more paperwork into the universe for someone else to process.

Number 3 was also out; I couldn’t just snap my fingers and leave the backyard. I had spent too many hours sitting on the front porch at five in the morning, parked there with my legs crossed and my back against the front door, relaxing and pondering the fact that the sun had progressed like a miracle around the world overnight, the peas had grown another inch, and the clouds looked like an ad for air fresheners. Similarly, I knew Rita’s evening routine, and what needed to happen if I volunteered to help her get into bed. It was like rolling a car off an assembly line, following a clear checklist of accomplishments: adult diaper changed and various balms and salves applied (check), robe and gate belt off (check), nightgown on (check), tissues (check), water glass (check), individual antacid tablets placed like easily accessed dominoes on the nightstand (check), lamp on, shoes off, nearby wheelchair parked close but not too close (check, check, and check).

I couldn’t just walk away from everything I knew.

Realistically all the clean-cut options were out, leaving me with something in between, something a-legal: I would recreate in my house, as was appropriate for a recreational vehicle, which might include sleeping, eating, resting quietly, listening
to music, hanging out, dressing, talking to myself, doing my taxes, and what not. I could define myself as Rita’s caretaker—as a good neighbor who leaned just as heavily on her neighbors as they leaned on her.

This option seemed to fit how we regarded each other, and when I mentioned it to a friend, she told me that many cities have a special dispensation for caregivers; so people can recreate in their RV while they’re helping their old mum with groceries, or perhaps setting up a hospital bed in the living room and sitting for hours at her bedside, resting their head on the metal hand rail and wondering what their mother is now dreaming.

It seemed to me, the city would likely support that sort of recreational living.