The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir (14 page)

We made it into Olympia just after lunch, and parked the house in a vacant lot tucked into a neighborhood of large houses. It felt like we’d been traveling for weeks, like I’d been living on bread and water, and now here I was in the Promised Land, which was really just a lot that belonged to Candyce’s ex-brother-in-law, who had agreed to let me stay on his property in exchange for weeding the garden. This would be home for the next week, while I prepped my final landing spot on the other side of town.

The lot was huge—three or four acres large—and the sort of place that could hold a whole subdivision of small houses. It looked like a state park, with eighty-foot fir trees, fruit trees, and a wide-open field that emptied out to a distant tree-lined
fence. There was a circle drive that terminated next to the foundation of an old farmhouse that had burned down, and a grape arbor that framed the spot perfectly.

“Holy Samoly!” I screamed as I crawled out of the truck, dripping sweat and slightly hoarse from the trip. “This is awesome!”

RooDee raced around the property, chasing squirrels, while we leveled the house with jacks. I put things away inside the house, standing the loft ladder in place and placing the teakettle over the stove. It felt so good to be standing in the house; a real house with real windows that looked out at Olympia, and a real bed that I’d put together in the loft. I stood for a second, admiring how beautiful it was, every inch, like I was seeing it for the first time.

That night, my friend Brad came over to check out my house. He had been a friend for years and more recently had been giving me acupuncture treatments for my heart. He was also a tiny-house nut and couldn’t wait to see the real deal.

The solar electric system wasn’t turned on yet, so as it got dark I gave him a tour of the house by headlamp, showing him the wood countertop, kitchen sink, compost toilet, sleeping loft, and the tiny window that opened up over the bed. We sat outside for a couple of hours, using a small candle as a bonfire; first listening to the bats whiz around scooping up bugs, and then smelling the woodsmoke from someone else’s fire.

Brad asked how it felt to finally be here, to be done, and I
said, “Amazing. Like I just delivered a four-thousand-pound baby and someone should write an article about it for the
Journal of Medicine
.” I chortled, and made fake cooing sounds at my front porch while I stroked the porch post like a baby. And then something weird happened: I started to cry.

I prefer to cry alone . . . in the car, in the shower, in bed, or in the bathroom stall at work where I can simultaneously cry and dig my fingernails into the toilet paper roll. So, as soon as I started crying, I wanted it to stop, which resulted in me holding my breath as Brad stared at his shoes, perhaps wishing he hadn’t asked how I was doing.

I closed my eyes and willed the tears to dry up. I didn’t want Brad to watch me cry so hard it looked like I was going to barf, and maybe he should hold my hair out of my face; to watch me cry so desperately he would wonder if there was something wrong with him for never having cried that hard. I didn’t need that; I was a champion, my friend, so I regained my composure and gently laid my hand on Brad’s, cracking a joke about how exhausted I was from getting in and out of the truck (a massive step that required a high-jump scissor kick to land on the seat).

I
was
a champion. I felt it everywhere—in my arches, the balls of my feet, my calves and shins; I felt it in my viscera, in my body pulpy, and in my arteries, which were currently carrying blood toward the bruise I’d made when I fell through the front door of my new house just after we’d arrived at the field. In that case, I had reached for a water bottle sitting in the
kitchen sink, but I lost my footing on the doorjamb and fell, stopping my fall with my ulna—the sturdy bottom bone connecting my wrist and my elbow, which had been breaking my falls since childhood. I had arrived, as if I’d conquered the impossible; as if I’d traveled across two mountain passes and eighteen hundred miles, carrying my children half the distance while my husband walked the ox and our covered wagon on ahead. And now all that remained was putting a bow on this perfect little package. Tomorrow I’d drive over to my soon-to-be-permanent home site, a lumpy place that required a rototiller to level things out, and I’d work on making things smooth and welcoming, and maybe tomorrow night I would sit on these same steps and feel less lost.

I
used obtuse language and a certain cheekiness to ferret out a place to park my house; it’s what I’d been doing for years, as, for example (and because this really happened), if I was free for Thanksgiving dinner, I might cackle into the phone, “It’s snowing out and I have a new saucer sled. If you’ll save a bit of that turkey fat, we can take things to a whole new level!” which was followed by an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner and a postdinner sledding event that was unparalleled in hilarity. It wasn’t that I had called specifically to be invited to dinner, but I certainly appreciated having that door opened. This is what my bachelor friends do all the time with laundry, food, and home decorating.

Something similar happened with regard to my house when
I proposed via e-mail, “Ha-ha, wouldn’t it be funny if when I finished my house, I parked it in your backyard?” Two sets of friends, Candyce and Paula (whose living room had become my bedroom during the months I had driven back and forth to Olympia) and Hugh and Annie (who had repeatedly invited me to Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner with or without a sled) had taken the bait and offered me their yards.

I walked the back lot on Candyce and Paula’s property. They had a weedy spot near their chicken coop where I could park my house and attempt to ignore the clamor from the neighborhood playground. It would be difficult to back the house into this spot; the accessing alley was grown over with apple trees and blackberries, and in fact, I couldn’t even find the alley until Candyce pointed it out.

A few weeks before I finished the house, I had taken a walk with Annie around Capitol Lake in Olympia, and as RooDee dove in and out of the cattails along the swampy shore, Annie turned and asked where I was going to park my little house. “Oh,” I joked, “I’m planning to put it in your backyard.” She laughed along with me, and a few minutes later dropped her voice. “We really hope you do.”

After our walk, I drove up the hill and perused their backyard. I walked down the access alley and surveyed the way it ran between two sets of fenced backyards, with Hugh and Annie’s lot on one side and a duplex with a kiddie pool on
the other. It was workable, and the corner lot where Annie imagined I could park was nice, albeit a bit close to Aunt Rita’s house.

Even though I’d visited Hugh and Annie’s house a thousand times, and celebrated some holidays and birthdays at Rita’s, I’d never noticed how compact their living arrangement seemed to be. Their houses were connected by a patio and a carport, thirty feet of common airspace, a lilac bush, and a massive hundred-foot fir tree that sat between the houses like the mast of a ship.

Somehow, the snug fit seemed workable, in the way that you might feel fine wearing a pair of overly tight jeans to a party, knowing everything would work out as it should in the end (fingers crossed).

I trusted Hugh and Annie in a way that made it seem okay to blurt out one day at Mark and Shelly’s house, as I was reading through the restrictions on Mark’s medications, “Hey, I’m also taking a medication that says you have to clean the feeding tube every time you administer the drug. HA!” I giggled and then looked up over my glasses, staring at Hugh and Annie, who had been in the middle of some other odd task, while Shelly was off with Mark and the boys were upstairs.

Annie gave me a look, inviting me to say more, and then simply said, “Your heart?”

“Ya,” was all I said.

They knew the story. I’d shared my prognosis but not in detail; I had explained things more in the way you’d list recipe ingredients, “heart, arrhythmia, defibrillator, medication, enlarged heart, failing.” And then I’d made a joke. I can’t remember that, but I’m sure it is true.

Days after our walk around Capitol Lake, I had called Hugh and Annie to ask about their backyard, and whether they were serious. Hugh offered that they had checked with the cartel—Rita, Keeva, and Kellen—and had then also talked with the neighbors and the laws of reason; everyone was on board.

So here I sat in a temporary open lot—a beautiful field circled by fir trees in Olympia, Washington—ready to venture over to Hugh and Annie’s house tomorrow to start Operation Get Here Now, as Annie was calling it.

Day two at Hugh and Annie’s house, we rolled away a section of the cyclone fence to let me back the house in from the alley. We then dragged in the rototiller so I could mulch the soil and level it out, and plow under the tall grass, old mint, and the small ant farms and bug cities that had assumed control of Hugh and Annie’s garden when they abandoned it a few years before. It was a massive production, and all the while I could see Rita sitting just inside her house, staring at me through the screen door.

“It’ll be a discombobulated mess in that corner over there
for only a little while,” I’d told Rita, “and then we’ll all get used to it.” She squinted at me as I spoke, partially because her eyesight was failing due to macular degeneration, but also because her backyard had been turned into a brown scab—a lumpy, weeping spot with part of the fence missing, which, even though this was a safe place, made the entire compound feel vulnerable.

“Humm,” she offered, and nodded.

While she watched, I leveled a little pad formerly occupied by thatching ants and some yellow-jacket wasps, and then brought in a load of wood chips to keep the place from turning into a mud swamp when the weather changed.

Meanwhile, my little house remained in the vacant lot across town. I tended to the owner’s garden, and walked the perimeter of the property to explore the old grape arbor, the blackberry vines, an old quince tree, and amazing three-foot-diameter fir trees. I loved it there except for the occasional feeling at night, when I’d struggle out of bed and stumble down the ladder, being guided by moonlight and the way I knew (I
knew
) every square inch of the house, to pee in my toilet, which was nothing more than a glorified bucket with sawdust littering my deposits. It was weird, and also comfortable. This was the new normal.

Finally, Hugh and Annie’s lot was ready to receive us, so I drove over using the back roads; the city streets I’d selected because they didn’t include too many low-hanging branches or
power lines and no squirreling intersections where a long (and “cute”) load would be at risk of smashing into a fire hydrant, decorative rock wall, or other hazards. I was giddy! I had made it over a hundred miles, around fifty curves, wind shears, bumps, and vibrations, and the little house had performed masterfully.

And then I rolled around the corner and hit my first tight spot: the entrance to the alley that would deliver me to my new backyard. It was blocked by an old sweet gum tree with knobby, low-hanging limbs.

Candyce, Annie, Hugh, Keeva, and Kellen gathered rakes and brooms to lift the branches high as I passed. I grabbed a tree saw from behind my truck seat, one of the few old house tools that I had kept, and without much fanfare I scrambled up the tree, steadied myself on a low limb, and whacked off a few choice branches—nothing too crazy, so as not to piss off the tree owner (I hoped). With that, I started to maneuver the house down the alley with a thumbs-up and then a big “Whoa whoa whoa” from Hugh. One branch, the real knob-knocker of them all, was about to peel the skylight off my roof, so I climbed the tree again, but this time with a ratcheting rope in tow. I slowly cranked the branch out of the way, yanking it closer to a branch a bit higher in the tree, and then released it once the house had squeezed by.

Twenty minutes later, after I had sweated a small lake of water into my T-shirt, my little house found its place in the backyard, nestled near the juniper bushes and the neighbor’s
chain-link fence. I set up my solar panels a few feet away from the house, pigtailing them into the electric panel that I’d installed inside the house below my locker-size closet, and I leveled the house with my truck jack and cinder blocks. The whole operation took less than an hour. Hugh and I set a couple of platform steps off the front porch, and we all gathered around, chatting and laughing. RooDee curled up next to Rita, her new best friend, and as the sun went down, my friends dispersed. I opened a beer, and parked myself on the front porch with my back against the door. Out of nowhere, a pinging sound erupted ten feet above my head, causing me to duck and giggle—bats. I knew the sound from our family farm as a kid but I hadn’t heard it in years.

Finally, I was home.