The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir Read Free Page A

moved into my house, I volunteered to show it in a green building fair, an event that included vendors like the ReBuilding Center and Habitat for Humanity, as well as local homeowners who had installed solar electric systems, recycled fir floors, and energy-efficient windows in their houses. While I didn’t have fancy systems in my house, I still figured it’d be helpful if people saw how beautiful salvaged cedar siding can be, and how wonderful a door pulled out of a dumpster (like mine) could be.
    At the fair, I met a teacher who thought it’d be nice to show her students my house, and that’s how a few months later I found myself hosting sixty-four fourth-graders in my yard. They were studying global climate change and asked some very important questions like where do I poop, where’s the bathtub, and why not build a giant slingshot to shoot my dog into the loft instead of having to carry her? They wanted to know if I washappy living without a television, without running water, and without space for a “husband” (whoever he was). I offered a quick “Heck yeah!” and then suggested that we all try to fit into the house at one time; it would be the “New International, Intergalactic, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, Hotshot, Full-of-Snot Record!” I screamed. All sixty-four of them raced into the house, stood on the toilet, piled onto the kitchen counter, smashed into the loft, and squeezed into the living room like a jar of human pickles. Everyone was giggling and I was thinking this was a great teaching moment, where they’d finally come to see that even something teeny-tiny can be big
enough
, and that’s when tragedy struck: Someone “cut the cheese,” as my brothers would say, and the entire class emptied out of the house in seconds like clowns pouring out of a circus car. We all collapsed on the lawn, fake-coughing and laughing hysterically, and intensely proud of the new record we’d set.
    I probably overemphasized how glorious everything is, using the word
awesome
too many times. I positively gushed about how
awesome
it was to live debt free, not really considering whether any of those kids fully understood how crushing it is to juggle bills, delicately staggering the payments throughout the month and shuffling money from one credit card to another. And they probably thought I was full of shit when I said it was
awesome
to live without a television and refrigerator, “free from that infernal, constant humming and drumming so now I can hear the tree frogs at night . . . blah blah blah.”
    If I had been perfectly honest, I would have admitted that I’m happy only 85 percent of the time, roughly three hundred days out of the year. The other days, I wish I had running water or that the house was warmer; or I might want a seventy-two-inch plasma screen television and enough space to invite all my friends over to watch the Oscars. I might want a flushing toilet and an endless supply of cheap beer, and a cutie-pie to play naked Scrabble with me in the living room. I might want more privacy and solitude, and for the city to get new garbage trucks so on Friday mornings I wouldn’t have to listen to all that hydraulic whining with heavy lifting and slamming back down. I might
want

a lot of things . . . but that doesn’t mean I
need
them.
    Here’s the raw truth: 15 percent of the time, you might find me grousing while slopping my water back to the house, or pouting about how I don’t like going to the laundromat to watch my underwear occasionally float by in the viewing window of the nearby clothes dryer. My complaining might result in my stomping off to bed, where I’ll check out of my life and watch three or four episodes of
Battlestar Galactica
on my laptop computer screen. In the morning, I’ll wake up late for work, cuss, and quickly yank rain pants over my pajamas so I can rush off to the office, where I’ll spend most of the day trying not to make loud plastic-pant crinkling and swooshing