A House is Not Just a Home

And so I read with great pleasure Madison Smart Bell's essay in The NY Times this morning about his tiny traditional house in Haiti. The essay was the perfect antidote to an NPR story yesterday about very rich people and their 20,000 square foot houses, and the 100 servants they can no loner afford in this tight economy. Them, I don't get.

I am not sure where my house will be—California, Hawaii, Italy or somewhere yet unknown—but it's not so far in the future, a few years at most. 

It will be familiar because I have lived in many tiny houses in my life. One was a converted garage in San Diego where you had to go outside and around the building to get to the bathroom. After that I lived in a real garage with two other girls, our beds lined up like a barracks and our bathroom a utility sink. But we loved opening the garage door to let in that perfect San Diego weather.

In graduate school I had an apartment so small that the fridge didn't fit into the kitchen (which was just a sink and a window), and so the fridge was in the teeny tiny living room. That bathroom was out the front door and across the landing.

And then many years later I was in a granny apartment, a studio with just my bed and dresser, and a bay window and my cat, Cola. It was heaven.

In 2002, my family, the ex-husband and our 5-year-old daughter, stayed for three months in a studio apartment in Florence, Italy, and we did just fine. Best of all, Sunday cleaning took 30 minutes and then we were off outside again.

Unlike Mr. Bell, my 900 square feet won't be bare of furniture and I won't be sleeping in a hammock. 

I intend to take the same brass and iron bed that fit into the granny apartment, the bed I have slept in for 35 years. And probably a cat, and of course my current roommate who will be in college but still need her own tiny room in our tiny house. 

We'll put sheets on the bed and hang the Balinese angels, and we will be home.