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

noises, and hoping that everyone believes I’ve just arrived from doing something important outside.
    Those are the days that most remind me of my old life in my big house where I’d charge around and act like the world owes me more; or where I’d rush through the days and watch television at night, and at the end of the week I couldn’t remember if I’d actually called my mother or simply wished that I had.
    Now, more often than not, instead of feeling pissed at the rain for turning my bones into soggy oatmeal, I’ll walk over to my friends’ house and they’ll make me laugh and feed me warm soup; or, in the case of a particularly hateful moment with my composting toilet, I’ll remember watching the little kids in Guatemala roll up their pants cuffs and walk across the muddy mess that was overflowing from the school’s bathroom, and I’ll realize I have nothing to complain about. I’ll remember like an apple to the head that I’m lucky to have what I have and that I’m not entitled to any more than those kids, or their fathers, whom we’d see walking along the roads at dawn, carrying their machetes out into the fields for the day.
    “My house is warm enough” is what I might eventually realize as I fall asleep mummified in my sleeping bag, and later I’ll wake up to see that the clouds are sprinting across the moon like a movie where the director wants you to think time is passing very quickly. Nature can be kind like that.
    I chose the 85 percent success rate, starting with the crazy decision to build the house myself, one stick of wood at a time; then the decision to build the house on wheels so I could comeand go as I please. I chose this path because the idea of building a house sounded like the old, fun me—the woman who thought it was a total jazz-up to hang by her thumbs fifty feet in the air, scaling some rocky crag to get a better view of the valley below. I chose this because I thought I could be happy living in a one-room house without running water or a refrigerator, and I imagined I’d learn something about myself by stripping myself down to the basics—by living with two dinner plates, three spoons, two pairs of pants, a dress, and my wool skivvies. And I figured I could be happy, at least for a while, living in the shadow of my friends Hugh and Annie’s house, in their old garden plot just off the alley.
    I thought I’d find something in all of this, and I got more than I bargained for. I discovered a new way of looking at the sky, the winter rain, the neighbors, and myself; and a different way of spending my time. Most important, I stumbled into a new sort of “happiness,” one that didn’t hinge on always getting what I want, but rather, on wanting what I have. It’s the kind of happiness that isn’t tied so tightly to being comfortable (or having money and property), but instead is linked to a deeper sense of satisfaction—to a sense of humility and gratitude, and a better understanding of who I am in my heart.
    I know this sounds cheesy, and in fact, it sounds fairly similar to the gobbledygook that friends have thrown at me just after having their first baby. But the facts are the facts: I founda certain bigness in my little house—a sense of largeness, freedom, and happiness that comes when you see there’s no place else you’d rather be.
    I found myself at Home, and that is (as I hope to tell the next set of fourth-graders)
awesome
!

Southeast State Park
    (PORTLAND, OREGON, APRIL 2003)
    I was standing in the bathroom of my former house, nervously chewing the inside of my cheek, holding a how-to book in one hand and a screwdriver in the other. This was the fortieth time I’d tried to figure out why the bathroom fuse kept tripping when someone ran the vacuum upstairs or when we flipped on the garbage disposal in the kitchen. It made no sense; the electric lines that ran upstairs and to the kitchen were on different circuits, and according to my book, everything should