Rootless: On Living in Small Spaces

 

My apartment living room, bedroom, dining room, office in Mobile, Alabama. July 2022. Credit: Mzuriana.

 

When I met a long-ago, longtime love, back in my rooted life, he lived in a small space above a bicycle shop. His space seems larger when I visualize it now, but at the time, it was so petite in comparison to my house (a modest baby ranch). 

He had a tiny bedroom that pretty much just fit a double bed, a tiny bathroom off the bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a largish living area, and best of all, a kind of enclosed balcony that, back in olden times, might have been called a sleeping porch. Windows surrounded this bonus lounging space. 

A cozy space; intimate. 

I remember thinking all those years ago: I could live in a space like this. 

Later, I met Jessica Terrell, who introduced me to tiny houses. She aspired to live in a tiny house. 

On long, meditative drives on road trips, my mind often travels to my perfect house: A one-room space that has, along one wall, a:

• Scandinavian-inspired, built-in "closet bed" (or "bed nook") with doors I can close during the day;
• Toilet room; and a
• Separate shower room.

Along a perpendicular wall are the sinks, refrigerator, and stove/oven. 

Universal design. Gosh, I love the premise, the promise, of universal design. It doesn't zero in on humans with disabilities. It includes everyone; it makes accessing the space easier for all. A description: 

The term universal design was coined by the architect Ronald Mace to describe the concept of designing all products and the built environment to be aesthetic and usable to the greatest extent possible by everyone, regardless of their age, ability, or status in life.

 I like its aim to be both aesthetic and usable. 

My El Paso kitchen. El Paso, Texas. September 2016. Credit: Mzuriana.

My El Paso bedroom, office, and so-called living room. El Paso, Texas. September 2016. Credit: Mzuriana.

It has happened not-infrequently in my life that when I imagine something, it eventually comes to pass. Maybe my imaginary house will, too.

And Even More on Tiny Living

Room at Yeni Hostel, Istanbul

Home, squeezed home: Living in a 200-square-foot space was in yesterday's Washington Post. It also points readers to a good article here: White Paper: The Small Spaces Trend. 

I've visited this topic several times because it calls to me: 

Voluntary Simplicity

 

Tiny Living

 

More on Tiny Living

This year, I happen to be living in a 832-foot apartment in Alamogordo. The space is so luxurious, I can't tell you.

 

But just as satisfying have been much smaller spaces. When I was in Addis, I met an Italian professor, teaching in Addis, who lived in the Taitu Hotel in a spacious room with a balcony. There was a sink in the room, but he had to go out and down the hall for a toilet or shower. I loved that room - just a huge square space with tall windows (if I recall correctly) and lots of light. And the balcony! Wood-plank floor, waist-high wall, overlooking the hotel/hostel's grassy cafe.

My rooms in Dubai and Istanbul - also livable for a long period, albeit tiny.

The trick for making tiny spaces truly livable seems to me to be the accessibility to usable outdoor space, whether that's, literally, a space just outside one's door where one can relax in some comfort (i.e., not in a climate that is too cold for much of the year), or figuratively, with an affordable cafe society or nearby public parks and the like. And certainly there needs to be easy access to food supplies, to eliminate the need for storage space to keep the food. (Or live in a location where it's more economical to order out than to make one's own meals.) 

Some issues I don't see talked about in re: the urban, tiny-living trend: 

People still drink water and generate human waste, regardless of the size of their residences. If tiny urban living really takes off, resulting in a significant increase in the population per foot of a city, what is the net ecological and economic impact? 

Should every metropolitan area encourage tiny housing, if the likely net outcome is increased population, such as cities that already consume too much water for their indigenous climate or rely too heavily on climate-control energy sources? Desert cities such as Phoenix, Tucson, or Las Vegas, for example.   

With a greater concentration of tiny houses in urban environments, shouldn't there be a conversation about built-in green spaces for each tiny-house enclave? Otherwise, when it comes to ecological impacts or quality-of-life points, how would a cluster of tiny houses without green space be much different than slapping up an apartment building? Just a false entitlement to smugness about one's carbon footprint, I think. 

More on Tiny Living

CNN has an intriguing article here, Tiny Homes Hit the Big City.

I've written about this before:

Tiny Living

Voluntary Simplicity

And, currently, my tiny allotment of material goods has moved out of a closet and into my car.

New York City's Mayor Bloomsburg wants to encourage the establishment of mico-apartments. Homes that are 300 square feet or less, including the kitchen and bathroom.

On one hand, I think, yeah, cool. More people can afford to live in the city. Smaller carbon footprint and all that. There's probably another side effect that helps the city economy - when your place is so small, you may find yourself going out more, thus spending more. In other words, reallocating your disposable income in a way that results in wider distribution than if you spent far more of your income just on rent and utilities. 

On the other hand, I think of the goat versus cow story told to me by an Ethiopian academic many years ago: As land was handed down to sons by their peasant fathers, their descendants - subsistence farmers - owned smaller and smaller pieces of land as it was divvied up with their brothers. The plots of land were becoming too small to support cattle, the traditional livestock of choice. Some smart people, perhaps with USAID, had a great idea: Encourage peasants to switch from cows to goats. The goats provide meat and milk like cows, but take up less space and consume less resources.

Upon hearing this, I said, "Hey, that is a great idea. Creative!"

And the Ethiopian academic said, "No, it's forcing the peasants to do all the changing. The oligarchy doesn't have to change anything. They keep their wealth and vast properties. What needs to happen is land reform."

So I like the idea of going smaller with our living spaces. But I wonder how big Mayor Bloomsburg's house is.  
 

Voluntary simplicity

I began this post thinking to share an interesting archive article from O magazine, sent to me by friend Terry,  called  Back to Basics: Living With Voluntary Simplicity. There was fodder in there for a discussion about the "business" of simplicity. I imagine I'll get to that another day. 

This is because, in thinking of voluntary simplicity, I remembered Jessica Terrell.

When she served as the trails coordinator for the state of Missouri, Jessica and I worked together on a couple of projects. She modeled voluntary simplicity.

 

You only meet a handful of people like Jessica in your lifetime. She had a positive impact on others simply by walking her talk of living lightly on the earth while embracing its beauty. Good sense of humor. Beautiful smile. Gentle air. Excellent writer. Adventurous. Hard worker. She liked to take at least one trip a year with her mother, who lives in Ohio. She farmed a plot in our town's community garden across the river.
Jessica wanted to live small materially, but big in other ways. (She won a grueling multiple-week, motorcycling competition shortly after moving west.) It was Jessica who introduced me to the world of Tiny Houses. Living in a tiny house was one of her goals.

Once, I met Jessica at another colleague's house for a meeting. Jessica was emptying some items out of her car to give to our colleague. I asked about it, and Jessica replied that she'd been in the process of giving away many of her things. To live smaller. She offered me her one-person tent, which I took (and only recently passed along to Brother4.)

One of Jessica's professional goals was to move from Missouri to New Mexico or Arizona, and work in trails there. When she shared this with me, she calculated it would be five or more years before an opening and her professional "cred" would align to make this happen. It turns out that both occurred soon after, and Jessica moved from Missouri to Santa Fe in 2006.

You'll have noticed that I refer to Jessica in the past tense. This is because she died in a collision with a tractor-trailer on a wintry day in 2008. She was only 30.

Jessica was on her way to another town where she would give a workshop related to trails. Earlier that day, in her office, she talked enthusiastically with a co-worker about a book of essays she was reading, written by Barbara Kingsolver.

Another person who knew Jessica told me she called herself a "vagabond for beauty."

In 2002, Jessica participated in the Public Lands Journey. I'd read Jessica's fine journal entries before, but after she died, I revisited them, and this one stuck out for me. It embodies simplicity.

My Favorite Day

… I know that when I return home, friends, and family will be asking “So what was your absolute favorite place on the whole trek?”

What will I tell them? I will start out by saying that every day inevitably seemed better than the last. “Seemed” is the key word, you must realize.

If I were to mix up all the days of the trek and do it all over again, each new day would never cease to “seem” better than the one before it!

So I have come to the conclusion that TODAY will always be my favorite.

The dawn of each new day has and will continue to reveal to me things that have never before occurred, and never will occur again, whether it be a beautiful cloud formation over a particular mountain, the call of elk on a cool morning in a national forest, or even the way rocks glitter in the brightness of the afternoon sun.

Jessica Terrell

1977-2008

Photo from www.MoBikeFed.org.