Tiny Houses

I do not want to live in a tiny house. Facebook does not seem to know this, since it offers me articles and ads—and ads dressed as articles—almost every day. Susceptible to most forms of consumer desire (think cuteness), and all forms of guilt (think the implosion of the planet), I sometimes actually read the posts, thus of course generating more of them.  Despite being a sucker for snugness, well-designed storage, and eco-building, I will not be living in a modified shipping container, bus, boat, or train anytime soon. While I tell myself this is because my household is so full of creatures, human and non-human, it is really because it is full of stuff. 

Take measuring spoons for example. Please. I have three sets of them. One is my mother’s old set with the tablespoon missing. One is the kind with slim rectangular spoons that fit into spice jars, and one is a newish round set. The designer of the rectangular set, although fully admirable in the matter of shape, has made the to me inexplicable choice of including not just the ¼,  ½, and full teaspoons, but also ¾ of a teaspoon and oh-so-weirdly half a tablespoon, which as far as I am concerned is not a quantity. The sheer number of options interrupts what one bread-baking video I watched called, surprisingly, “my library of gestures”: in this case, the quick flipping of spoons and the identification of the correct one I can achieve even in the dark, when the lights go out or at a campsite in a windstorm. Now it is more like playing the piano—at which I was always bad even when I played the piano—an octave of spoons, a shuffling and a peering, perhaps a pause to put on my glasses steamy with hot kitchen air. These spoons, I feel, are only for spices and belong in the savory spice drawer, not the one under the mixer where the baking spices are. So, one reason I like having three sets of measuring spoons is that they serve different purposes. As someone who has never perfected the art of clean-as you-go, I also like not having to wash them out before finishing a recipe. And I also love my set with the missing spoon especially when I am cooking something that does not require a lot of one ingredient—think baking soda or nutmeg. I even like pausing as I bake to contemplate the missing spoon, and to think about cooking with my (now also absent) mother.

Measuring spoons are, of course, quite tiny themselves. Even a tiny house could probably accommodate three sets, especially if I found a way to “nest” them. (The word itself suggests the romance of tiny, contained spaces). Whisks are a slightly bigger problem. I have three of these as well, each calibrated to a different density of the matter to be whisked. Moving up the scale and thus to more recalcitrant objects, I have six comforters for four beds; they are all of different weights and sizes. I did, finally, give away my weighted dog blanket bought in an anxious moment to ease my dog’s postoperative anxiety. Although I have pared down my sheet collection to the recommended two of each size (in case of dog vomit or similar), my table linens are a blowsy disgrace, spilling from multiple closets, each perhaps the size of a tiny house on wheels. I imagine my runners, napkins, dishtowels and tablecloths bulging out of those cunning slide-out drawers in the stair risers of tiny homes and shudder at the accidents that would inevitably happen as my family and guests (if any) would become literally enmeshed in my excess belongings.

Maybe, I think, it is all about the dogs. It is easy to blame them, in part because most people think we have too many. When we first moved into our not-tiny home we had something the builder called a “butler’s pantry” a name which causes my boys to feign ignorance and enact distain. Since the pandemic, that problematically named and artfully arranged space, with its vases, serving pieces, and barware, has become a place for hoarding dog food: fatty wet food, fatty dry food, unkibble topper, fat-free wet food, and fat-free dry food; the last of which is piled high in preperation for the apocalypse.  We are, it seems, a family of dog food hoarders, even if you don’t count the two identical but differently colored can openers always at the ready because really, if one breaks, there is no substitute. We are also hoarders of nuts, dried fruit, cereal, and certain gluten-free flours that appear seductively on supermarket shelves only to disappear like a Bad Boyfriend once you have, say, learned how to make a roux with potato flour.

There are so many reasons to have so much stuff, and the reasons contradict themselves. Is it fear of scarcity born of financial precarity? The acquisitiveness of privilege under capitalism? Is it that I do not recognize what “sparks joy” or that my joyfulness attaches itself promiscuously to too many things? Perhaps my diagnosis—for there is no other word for it—is focusing on the wrong symptoms. It is not so much that there are many things in my house, but that there are too many versions of the same things. Seven eco-friendly water bottles are not, after all, exactly ecofriendly. What is it about multiples that compel me? Can/should I trace it back to being the only one, the only child? To a longing for someone else similar yet mysteriously different, maybe a little smaller, like half a teaspoon? Does this explain my preference for china cups that are all the same shape but vary in their pattern? Or my love for books that come in series?

There is a place in my fantasies, though, for a tiny house. I have described elsewhere my birth family’s penchant for the petite: my mother’s miniature purses and tea sandwiches, our shared feeling that many things and most people were just too big. My father, who was not particularly small, made tiny objects out of wood and clay; he built, in my lifetime, three tiny houses. Made for play and not for living, these houses helped define sense of scale and memory and of what it meant to love and be loved. I will visit at least one of these—for of course they were multiple—next week.