More Stuff, More Work

Life in the Age of Limits

Back when William Shatner was young and I was younger still, American family life revolved around the TV schedule. Star Trek, the version without any qualifiers, was perfectly emblematic of its era. We stared at our little ovaloid screen and the Star Trek characters, week after faithful week, stared into their big flat one. Aided by some mysterious spy technology, the Enterprise's crew could see anything on their command deck's TV, no matter how distant or how heavily cloaked by gaseous anomalies. They looked out on a universe of infinite possibility. By proxy, so did we.

Now, four decades later, I'm a Battlestar Galactica (BSG) fan and I can't help noticing that there's no screen on the ship's command deck (Note to anyone who might feel the urge to disclose how the final season ended: don't make me HUNT YOU DOWN). Admiral Adama and the post-racial cutie whose name escapes me, have naught but some WWII-style blips to look at. No big TV for them because there's nothing to see, no infinite plenitude to gape adoringly at. The universe is dark and unknowable and shrunk down to the size of whatever galactic conduit will get the human refugees to the Earth of legend. Humans live small and make do. They recycle everything that the slavering Cylons haven't yet managed to strip away from them. This summer, when BSG has wrapped up its final season against a back-drop of limits, limits in food, limits in oil, you can't help being a little infected by the series' sense of dread.

At least, that's how I felt in Texas. Now, living on Long Island, many miles and two weeks away from all the stuff and all the square footage we had back in Texas, here's what I want to tell Adama and the gang: lighten up, people! Before the Cylons stripped your planet off of you, it was all work, clean, trim, rake, prune, pay bills, work again, ad exhaustium.

When I first wrote about the Wee Cottage a few blog posts ago, I was putting my game face on, hoping, contra the evidence of past experience, that I really would be happy without the two-person shower and the jacuzzi tub and all the other amenities that grace our lives back in Texas. Whatever its faults, our home in Austin certainly has stuff: the frequently used bread machine, the never-touched pasta machine, the two side-by-side fridges, the garage choked with out-moded phones and retired keyboards, with A/V cables, USB cables, component cables, and extension cords (two- and three-wire, American and English). Without all this stuff, would it be like living in a cave?

(My mother had declared that it would be just like "camping out", which was her way of signaling again that any time spent away from her should amount to no more than a long camping trip. But that's a story for another time.)

Well, it's been two weeks and I haven't felt deprived, at least not much. And to understand how I frame my thoughts on this issue, I have to confess what I do at night to fall asleep, confess how dull and predictable it is. First, I mentally recite all the poems I can remember by heart. There aren't many so it's rarely enough to send me off. Then, and instead of deep thoughts about world peace, I run through a mental outline for a novel that's part SF and part bodice-ripper. My current favorite is one where a starship's minor lieutenant, devoted to her duty and indifferent to romance, and who is some kind of alien half-breed, falls in love with a creature very like a Vulcan in his stoic ethos but who looks a helluva lot like Viggo Mortensen. It's important, when trying to fall asleep, not to over-stress the bodice-ripper aspects of this novel. Instead, I dwell on how I might disguise the elements so obviously ripped off from Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and The Rings trilogy. My consciousness, now confronted with the demand to get a single original idea, usually, mercifully, puts me to sleep.

But not always! And that's when I'm driven to indulge in the guiltiest of guilty pleasures, thinking about what my ideal house would be like. On the subject of automobiles, I've always held to a former boss's philosophy that "We don't staff to peak." Lots of families pay hundreds or thousands of excess dollars on a vehicle large enough to cart the volleyball team around exactly two weekends out of the year. That's fine for them, but we haven't found it much trouble to just rent big when we need something big (and some cities have car-sharing schemes now, which is even cheaper).

But despite my miserliness towards automobiles, I've never taken the same attitude towards houses. Next time I'm shopping for a house, I'm going to try to think differently. If we've learned anything living in the Wee Cottage, it's that in the age of headphones, the one-man-one-laptop family can hang out in the same room. Equip a family room with decent cabinetry, enough to hide all that gear and all the docking stations that everyone requires (okay, we're a one-man-one-laptop-one-IPOD family), plus a commonly used TV, and you've saved yourself 300 square feet right there. That's possibly 20% less of your home to clean, to heat, to cool.

I think a lot of people, let's face it, women specifically, would have difficulty giving up on the idea of a formal dining room. But why? This morning, on another splendid walk that has become my substitute for my daily ride back in Texas, I came across a yard sale, where, as always, the natives were more than willing to be drawn into an extended yak-fest about the area. They were selling an exquisite set of bone china, the kind you never come across when you're actually looking for formal china to buy second-hand. The elderly gentleman trying to flog the set to me shook his silvery head and said, "My daughter got that as a wedding gift. She hasn't used it even once. Nobody ever wants to leave the kitchen table, not even at Christmas."

It struck me that an area as nice as this part of New England, where there's a pretty restaurant on every corner, must have plenty of private party rooms one could rent. For the money you saved on roughly 200 square feet of construction, heating and cooling, you could easily rent a hall for that one holiday dinner where all your relatives show up. And, maybe, by hosting the dinner in a separate building, they'll be less inclined to spend the night with you. At least not all at the same time!

As for the small bedrooms, they're big enough. I'll concede that the size of bedrooms and bathrooms complement each other. The 50s 'vanity', where a lady dolled herself up, was a necessity because the bathroom was always tiny and always used by someone else. I could easily adapt to a scheme where I had a bedroom large enough to contain a lovely old vanity (not that I need the work, mind you) and the bathroom could be nothing more than a sink and a capacious tiled shower (a separate WC is essential to me now, after years of having one.) For a bath, I'd like a hot-tub outdoors when I need a soak. I know, I know. People in hell want a glass of ice-water, too.

The only room I can't imagine ever reducing in size is the kitchen. While the lack of any counter-space in the Wee Cottage hasn't been that much of a hassle -- there's plenty of pre-prep around these days -- I miss making my own bread and turning out a stock or a curry from scratch. I realize that 50s housewives in Britain worked at a single detached cabinet, called a larder, but I can't imagine how they did it. My former mother-in-law had one. Larders were smallish cupboards that stood maybe six feet tall and a yard wide, with a pull-down shelf providing a kitchen's only work surface. I remember staring gape-mouthed as my mother-in-law would bring out one course after another: a soup, then a proper English roast with at least four side dishes (my mouth waters as I write), then the Bramley Apple pie with the traditional pouring custard, then the coffee. Perhaps I should have paid better attention to how she managed such a feat in so little space but she didn't like me and as a kid who was moved from house to house every summer, I had never learned how to make anyone like me. Finding common ground around a love for cooking never occurred to me. So her skills parted this earth with her.

I think the main reason I'm so receptive to reducing the size of our house is that so much time has been freed up. Just beating back the Tide of Crud in our Austin home takes at least a couple of hours a day. The Wee Cottage can be made spotless in two hours flat. Per week. And that has given Jesse and I time to feed baby goats, write blog entries, and learn to torture more expensive yarn in new and creative ways (Progress! I had to rip out the sock I've been knitting only five times this week).

But who am I kidding? There's no shelf I can clear that Mike can't fill with books. If I free up the time, I'll just fill it up. After petting this little fellow, I'm thinking how lovely a small goat farm would be . . .