The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (12 page)

Later that night, we all sat on the front porch and stared across the street at my half-finished little house. It was a sorrowful sight—a tarpaper shack, chocked up on cinder blocks. Neighbors and friends had used white chalk to graffiti the sides, drawing funny faces and slogans like “Eat Here” and “Get Gas.” I couldn’t decide which reminded me more of
The Grapes of Wrath
: my little cabin or my dad’s boat, which now leaned with the weight of furniture as knickknacks cluttered the bow. Sipping our beers, we were both held captive and silent, dreaming of what was next—to the sea or the shallows, alone or with others.

They left a few days later, dragging a boatload of household items with them; leaving me with a living room that echoed and a better understanding of my family wiring. It was wacky and illogical to trailer a twenty-five-foot sailboat for eighteen hundred miles, and it made no sense to anyone but my dad, but he didn’t care. He didn’t ask for anyone’s permission or approval. And a week later, while my mom clutched the guard rails, my dad launched his boat at a local Missouri reservoir,
amid drowned-out scrub oak and above former rolling grasslands, happy as a clam as he sailed from one side of the tiny lake to the other.

That obstinate sense of independence was the biggest challenge I faced in building my little house (that, and not always knowing what I was doing). I was stubborn in the way I hated to ask for help. Some people are good at it, asking friends or their husband to collect ginger ale and crackers at the grocery because they feel nauseous, or standing on the side of the road with a tire iron in one hand, hoping someone will stop to change their flat tire. I’m not like that; I’d rather have a rough stick dragged across my gums than walk to the neighbor’s house to borrow sugar or ask for help jump-starting my car.

In the first few weeks that I was building, I’d loaded and unloaded all the lumber myself, hefting sheets of plywood that weighed sixty pounds—more than half my own weight—up onto the roof rack of my car and then off it and into the garage. I had sorted through the framing, figuring out how to build the undercarriage and floor bracing. I went into work every morning with my new man hands, with knuckle scrapes, splinters, finger cuts, and sore muscles, but I have to admit: I liked it. It felt good to be working and building new muscles. I remember falling asleep one night doing a little inventory: my ear was swollen from nearly ripping it off while moving plywood (I had a special technique that involved quickly yanking the wood off
the roof of my car toward my head and then ducking so it could be loaded on my back, which worked great until my earring got caught and nearly delobed me). My toenail was black from dropping a drill on it, and my arms felt like jelly, and everything in between ached.

My guess is that my ears and limbs, back and butt would be less mangled if I’d had the courage to ask for help. For example, one day I was unloading lumber into the garage and accidentally knocked a door off its hinge. It was an old wood door that weighed a ton. I decided to reset it myself by hefting it up to a standing position and wrestling it into position across from the little pegs that held the hinge; I was spread-eagle with feet, arms, head, and a pry bar stretched as far as possible to properly angle the door. If this move was illustrated in a how-to book, it would be called “cat on a screen door” and would include multiple illustrations and a liability waiver.

I was sweating and grunting, making noises that I hadn’t ever heard come out of my body, when my defibrillator fired. It sounded like the igniter on a range top, a
tcht, tcht, tcht, tcht, tcht
, and then it stopped. For some reason, I didn’t let go (perhaps a primal instinct to avoid being laid flat by the door). I simply grimaced, clenched my teeth, and held on just like I had on the ladder with the skylight.

Some people would view this as a moment to catch their breath and back away, to call a friend or a door-hanging expert,
but instead, I was mad at the door—at its size and my need for a fucking pry bar. I was pissed; if I had been a cartoon, my eyes would have spiraled and glowed red, and my body would have transformed to Hulkish proportions. Suddenly, I was imbued with superhuman strength, because I was able to lift the door and stick it back on its hinge, with a mighty
yawp
and then a big “Fuck you!” And then my defibrillator fired another series of shocks and I burst into tears.

Later, I told this story to my cardiologist and he explained that my defibrillator hadn’t fired full-force; it had been quarter-force, a mechanism designed to pace me back into a normal rhythm (the equivalent of dropping a lit sparkler down your shirt, as opposed to a battery cable in a bathtub). I was relieved to learn that the box was equipped to sense my every move, but what the hell was I supposed to do when I got in a pinch?

“So what
did
you do?” my cardiologist asked, growing serious.

“I rehung the door and cussed it out,” I said, “and then finished unloading the plywood.”

I was stubborn like that, refusing to let my heart redefine how I operated. Looking back, there is a part of me that wants to replace the word
stubborn
with
reckless
; there are many things I would do differently now, but what good does it do to retrace your steps? Sometimes you simply do the things you do,
and it doesn’t necessarily help to pick on the “old you” by proclaiming how smart the new you is.

Of course, out of necessity, I did occasionally ask for help. After building my house, I tallied up the total cost: ten thousand dollars’ worth of windows, wood, engineered metal straps, the trailer, and a stupidly expensive solar electric system. But that doesn’t include the amount of money that I spent on beer and pizza and coffee and muffins to support the hours of work that I got from friends. They helped me lift the walls into place, sheath the roof, build the kitchen cabinet, and insulate the walls. One day, my friend Karen spent two hours planing old barn wood so I could use it in the overhangs; the dust burned her hands and left a red stain on her face outlining her respirator. She looked like a scary clown for two days.

My friend Eileen kept me from going nuts by bringing me burritos, pizza, coffee, and beer, and helped in lifting, sanding, screwing, nailing, refastening, restaining, and remilling wood. Now I wonder if she wasn’t simply worried about me; all my friends were worried about me, and I had cleverly shut down. If someone asked how I was doing, I’d laugh and say, “Fantastic,” and that was true. I really was having a blast figuring things out, learning how to walk a four-foot skylight up a ladder in flip-flops, and how to jury-rig a plug-in so I could test my electrical system. It was a huge amount of fun, and resting alongside that adventure was the way I sometimes stewed on my
diagnosis: congestive heart failure, the sort of disease that leaves you sleeping on the couch because you can’t summon the energy to walk upstairs to your bedroom. It leaves your lungs filled with fluid, and so weak that you agree to move into your friends’ living room, allowing them to set up a very nice articulated hospital bed because “it’s the easiest and most comfortable way to do this.”

I felt better when I didn’t think about that stuff, when I focused on the fact that I could now lift a fifty-pound roll of tar paper like I was picking up the chairs in the kitchen to mop the floor. “Easy-peasy,” I’d said as I pulled the last load of wood off the top of my car and stacked it in Camelli’s garage. I was scared about getting sick and landing with hospice care in my friend’s living room, lying there watching the ceiling fan while they ate dinner in the kitchen. It was better this way, me risking life and limb every day in the interest of my favorite project.

I couldn’t have mustered the wherewithal to talk about my fear with my friends. Instead, I invited folks over for Southeast State Park functions: barbecues, bonfires, pizza and beer, an opportunity to play “who can donkey-kick the lawn chair the farthest” and “who can stand on one leg, bend over, and pick up a paper bag with their teeth the most number of times.”

Only one friend seemed to gather enough courage to ask me point-blank about how I was sincerely doing with regard to my heart: my friend Lizzie, whom I’d known for years . . . since college; before she finished graduate school, law school, got
married, and had kids. We were standing in my big kitchen, just before I finished the little house, and as we prepped burgers, slapping them in our palms like tiny baby bottoms, she asked me quietly, “Are you doing this because you’re dying?”

“What? No-o-o-o,” I stuttered as I flipped on the kitchen sink to wash my hands and find a pithy comeback. “No. I’m doing great; the little house is something I’ve always dreamed about. It’s the midlife convertible I would have gotten if I was midlifed and could afford it.”

“Deedles,” she said, leaning into me by the sink, using the nickname she’d used when we were twenty years old and playing Frisbee in the park, “you know we love you. If you need anything, you can ask.” She added this last part in a whisper, with her mouth barely inches from my ear.

I didn’t know what to say, so I sputtered “Got it” as Lizzie reached past me and turned off the faucet. “Thank you,” I offered, giving Liz a quick smile, and then grabbed the plate of burgers and walked out to the grill.

I couldn’t imagine talking with my dearest, best friends about what had caused me to distance myself. They only saw that I was focused on details—lining up the screws along the sidewalls so they were all evenly spaced, using a level and tape measure to make sure the roof screws were properly aligned, and painting the shiny silver flashing a brick-red color so it wouldn’t stand out around the windows. In my mind, it was all about the little things—the way the sun would likely catch and
reflect the exposed metal straight back in your eyes when you least expected or wanted it—and controlling the final outcome.

A few weeks later, on Labor Day weekend, I was “done enough.” The exterior was “buttoned up,” as my carpenter friends would say when they were too tired to keep working and had sealed things up well enough to keep the weather out. The house looked gorgeous: just like an ad for pancake syrup or a painting called
A Simpler Time
.

The interior was insulated and sealed with knotty pine wall board but it still lacked window trim and kitchen shelves, and the little metal brackets that secured the front porch posts hadn’t yet been trimmed out. I figured I’d get to that as soon as I landed in my new parking spot.

I’d spent a few nights in the little house, stretched out in my sleeping bag on a lawn chair cushion with my dog. I felt vulnerable sleeping there, like I was camped in my car and the neighbors were going to walk by in the night and see me drooling into my pillow. I also felt incredibly self-satisfied, remembering the day an East Indian man had stopped by with a camera, taking a photo of me in the loft as I shoved the blue-jean insulation into place, and remembering another day when a friend’s little girl, Esmee, had practiced her hammering with a tiny wooden mallet, in synch with me pounding nails into the wallboards to hold them in place. I knew every square inch of this house. I
knew
it.

I fell asleep with a nearby streetlight leaking into the loft,
outlining the way my muscular arm reached up and traced the form of the Big Dipper, the only constellation visible through the city’s light pollution. I had done it.

“We made it,” I whispered to RooDee, feeling her butt wedge against me to grab a bit more space on our cushion. “Now the adventure begins.”

(OLYMPIA, WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 2012)

I
woke up this morning to a layer of frost on the skylight window. It was barely noticeable when I first opened my eyes, but as I lay there with the sun slowly pinking things up, I realized it looked like a Christmas tree had fallen on the roof. The crystals had formed into dozens of eight-to-ten-inch needled tapers, shooting off in all directions. I studied it, trying to put my finger on where I’d seen this before, and then I realized it was just like lying on my back when I was a kid, tucked under our family Christmas tree and looking up through the lights and ornaments.

I rolled on my side with the blankets over my head, and studied the frost like an art student studying a famous painting,
like the twenty-year-old I used to be, when my teacher would send us off to the museum to study Van Gogh. I imagined that if I was still that girl, I’d balance my sketchbook on my lap now and attempt to pencil-draw each needle of frost. I’d start with the mass at the center of the window where the light seemed most intense, and work my way out to the edge where everything was melting. “Crap!” I blurted to my dog. I shot out from under the covers and tripped over myself trying to crawl across the bedding, trying to get out of the loft before the frost fully disappeared. I finally made it to the end of the bed, raced down the ladder, and a second later scampered back up with my camera, where I then hovered in the fog of my own breath as I snapped a photo called
The Christmas Tree
.

My dog had remained still through the entire affair, staring at me with her tail draped over her nose, but failing to uncurl her body as I knee-walked back to the window, camera in hand, crying, “Hey, would you look at that!”

The fact is, even after all these years of sleeping with my head inches from the roof, of rolling over day after day to see what’s outside the skylight or on the skylight, after all this time and even though my dog has heard it all before, nature still surprises me. And then I’m surprised by my surprise, thinking that, at this stage of the game, I should be a bit bored by things like frost. In past winters, I’ve had frost that looked like fiddleheads, daggers, paisleys, martini picks, traditional snowflakes, dull wax paper, droopy wheat stalks, and sea kelp. The patterns
on the east-side skylight, over the living room, were always different than those on the west side over my bed, and it seemed to me that there was some competition involved, like the windows were challenging each other to see who could create the most spectacular, supernatural effect in ice. I’ve taken photos of all of them to prove they once existed and to remind myself, later perhaps, when I’m preoccupied or stuck, or if I ever find myself doing dull little tasks inside a watery little office, that nature is stunning and that I was once happy living in a small house in winter.

For this same reason, I’ve tried to take photos of the light pouring in through the windows, hitting the opposite wall first thing in the morning. You can see the walls turn from wheat-colored to rose to amber, like the inside of a honey jug, but it takes a while, and my camera (which is also my cell phone
and
a flashlight, minicomputer, and construction level) can’t filter the light change very well. It also can’t pick up the subtle way frost or snow can look like the bottom of a Styrofoam cooler sitting on the skylight, or the way a big buildup of snow sounds like a bag of flour hitting the ground when it finally slides off the roof. My camera-phone can’t capture what it smells like to walk into my house, or the way snow smells like a cotton ball, but I really wish it could. If my phone could capture odors, this morning I would have taken a picture of my dog’s feet and the way they still smell like green grass and summer, even though everything has turned to mud outside.

The photos are pixelated and stored in my phone, and sometimes I’ll forward them to my computer, where they’re tucked neatly into a file that I’ve named “Photos.” There’s no further file organization beyond that; no smaller files labeled “Natural Wonders” or “Odd Things That Happen Sometimes,” so someday when I want to find
The Christmas Tree
, I’ll have to sort past
Spider in Keyhole
,
Sun in Earhole, Ants Carrying Cheese Puff
, and a hundred other photos. Most of the time, I appreciate the distraction and embrace it as an opportunity to revisit some of the more stunning things I’ve witnessed in the universe, but occasionally I’ll just want to find the one damn photo, and that’s when I’ll question the value of keeping so many things, even if they’re smaller than a frozen water molecule floating in cyberspace.

Years ago, in my big house, I probably would have enlarged and framed
The Christmas Tree
, and then I’d have tucked the clunky framed photo on the shelf near the fireplace, where I’d occasionally look at it and feel satisfied with myself. It would sit next to photos of my dog at the ocean and my friends looking impish, and would complement the various houseplants and books that littered the shelves.

There was a large painting that towered above the fireplace, resting on top of the mantel because I couldn’t find a way to hang it on the brick wall. It showed a rotund naked lady sitting in a chair with her head resting on her hand and her eyes closed like she’d just dozed off—the pose you’d strike sitting at
the doctor’s office or while waiting for an overdue train, only naked.

The picture came from a friend who had purchased it from an art student, who had probably sold all his artwork to fund a trip to Europe. He had created it in a portrait class, stretching the canvas himself, painting the naked lady, and then banging together a wood frame to finish it out. It had a “just finished” feel to it that made it unpretentious but at the same time more dynamic than anything else I’d seen. Maybe it was the color or shadows, the paint layers, or simply the way the lady slumped in the chair like a perfect sigh; whatever the reason, it didn’t take much imagination to think that, at any second, the model might come alive. She’d open her eyes and do a sleepy stretch, arms extended, rib cage expanded so her breasts grew to the size of trash can lids, then she’d lean forward, grab her robe, arise, and walk out of the frame.

I had nearly cried when I handed the painting off to a friend, and again when I took down the paintings in the dining room and living room, pieces that were gifts from friends, along with my own work. It was hard to fathom that anyone would enjoy this artwork as much as I had—that they’d understand the beauty in my friend John’s illustration of an exploding stick of dynamite, or the story behind my pencil drawing called
Girl Running with Scissors
—so I packaged up the pieces and later slid them into Candyce and Paula’s attic for storage. Months later, when they invited me to dinner, I walked in and found
that they’d rummaged through the attic and rehung most of the artwork in their own living room. They were worried I’d be angry, but instead I was shocked and relieved—it was like finding your family wrapped in emergency blankets after a daring rescue at sea.

I had no idea that “letting go” would be so complicated; that it would sometimes feel liberating and other times more sorrowful and lonely. In the long run, most of it was like standing on the shore, watching your family set sail for America, and they’re smiling and waving good-bye, and getting smaller and smaller, but you are still the same size with no one to talk to.

I managed the artwork in late August, saving it for last, after parting with my furniture, the rugs, garden tools, and kitchenware. When I finally got around to the stuff on the walls, the floors were already empty.

Culling through my books was the hardest. I had hundreds—novels and biographies, a full set of art encyclopedias, poetry anthologies, home repair manuals, travel guides, schoolbooks, and journals that I’d schlepped along on backpacking trips, kayaking, and back and forth to university. They were my companions, friends who had moved with me from one house to another, from one state to another, over mountain passes into Olympia for six years, then south to Portland and the Willamette Valley for another six. They had entertained me late at night, put me to sleep, made me laugh or cry, or made me feel normal.

Books had rescued me when I most needed saving, like when I was visiting my parents and wanted to appear too busy to answer their questions about why I had broken up with my last “special someone,” as my mom liked to say. Books had sustained me when I was too sick to do anything but lounge about on the couch in the living room, when I wondered what might be the last thing in my mind as I drifted toward my own death: maybe the image of a boat being kicked away from the shore with an endless blue sky above and the sea spreading out forever, just like a scene in a Hemingway novel.

They had been the things that I’d stood on, sometimes literally, but more often, when I wanted to see how to repair the kitchen sink or rewire the bathroom, or was attempting a complicated remodel of the old plaster walls in the downstairs bedroom. Books were smarter than me and words inspired me. I still think that Diane Ackerman’s poem challenged me to build a little house in the first place—to try something new, charge forward without a clear understanding of what would happen next, because: “given something like death, what does it matter if one looks foolish now and then, or tries too hard, or cares too deeply?”

In the end, Thoreau, Whitman, Hafiz, and a dozen other writers put me up to the task of seeing if I dared to “live a life worth living.” They left me no choice but to pull the rug (along with the couch and all the other furniture) out from under my old normal life, which, sadly, at that moment included letting
go of my mentors, their words, and their books, so I could put my faith in the good old-fashioned public library.

It took me a long time to sort through the bookshelves. At first, I thumbed through each volume, reading the little notes scribbled in the margins, and gently placing each book in a box. But after a while, as the gravity of saying good-bye wore me out and I was able to pick up the pace, I could focus on the task at hand, as if I were working in a slaughterhouse, where there was nothing left to do but keep pace, grab the book off the shelf, throw it in the box, repeat, and hope the day would end soon enough. It was horrible, and it made me think of the way my mother had hugged me extra hard but was otherwise stiff, and almost mean, on the day I loaded myself into my car for the move from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest and my new home. I had no idea, until now, how my leaving must have weighed on her.

I didn’t plan for this sort of hardship; I thought getting rid of stuff would be a simple matter of elbow grease and logic. Feelings of loss or remorse weren’t supposed to be a factor, because the real adventure was in building the little house—in operating power tools and going to the lumberyard and finding my way through the aisles of metal fasteners, brackets, house wrap, and wood. I thought there wouldn’t be any emotion left after refastening the rafters for the third time. I thought I would be beyond all of that.

I had earmarked a full weekend to crank through the entire house, imagining that I could pare things down to their least common denominators: basic necessities (like a good kitchen knife, a pillow, and underwear) and stuff that I appreciated but could survive without for the next few months and possibly forever. I figured it would take a few minutes to sort through the kitchen drawers, chock-full of mismatched silverware, old twisty-ties, and utensils that I couldn’t recall ever using. I imagined it would be easy to slide things into garage-sale boxes and to sort the stuff that was functional and not too badly stained from the stuff that needed a good washing or, sadly, was destined for the landfill.

Within a few minutes of my kitchen job, I realized I was in trouble. I stumbled upon the pantry where my housemates and I had shoved our canned goods: abandoned pinto beans, spaghetti sauce, old Chex cereal, rice, and dried spices. It was like staring through a telescope at the galaxy, with a spiraling nebula of canned peaches and a supernova of plastic baggies full of oats, lentils, quinoa, wheat berries, and pasta. It made me feel small. “Lard help me,” I muttered as I threw out unused Crisco. I pawed through the lot, examining the labels and wondering which one of my housemates over the years had purchased canned okra and pickled beets, only to realize it had been me, which launched me into a full-scale review of every can, searching for the expiration date and wondering if it was
possible to get food poisoning from a can of four-year-old chili. I felt horrible within the first ten minutes of the first day of the first month of my cleanout. “What was I thinking?” I lamented as I grabbed the little hand-crank can opener and started cleaving open all the expired canned goods and dumping their guts into the compost.

It took me hours of mind-numbing work to sort through the pantry, and then there was the rest of the house: the attic, the basement, garage, and yard, which proved to be just as difficult. The basement was full of old house paint, rollers, plumbing supplies and building materials, ski equipment, golf clubs, climbing gear, kayaking stuff. There was a cabinet full of boatbuilding material, expensive fiberglass cloth, resin, brass fittings, ring-shank nails, and paint—stuff that was so expensive, I sort of wanted to punch it for leaving me with such a difficult chore.

In the end, it took me months (time interrupted by work and house building . . . but months!) to go through all my belongings, and I can’t even remember what happened to most of this stuff; I only remember that all of it had to go and I wanted to keep it. It was agonizing. There was some consolation in giving things away to people I knew, instead of loading them into a Goodwill box, so early on I got a roll of masking tape and started labeling boxes: “John and Brenda” or “Chinn and Fritz,” and anyone else I could imagine who might enjoy a box of bathroom tiles, a set of art encyclopedias, or a bag filled with
stinky cotton balls (largely pulled out of vitamin bottles) hat could be made into a nice-looking Santa beard at Christmas.