Thoreau's Nightmare

We are in the unhappy process of trying to sell a house. Since our little girl arrived three years ago, we’ve thought about selling the house in a casual way. All of our neighbors had changed three times or so in the last seven years, and each time the house sold for an unbelievable increase. Finally, when our little boy showed up last year, we thought we’d give it a try. We put it on the market seemingly days after the whole housing industry went to the toilet.

I love this house and its big, big back yard, which is part of what makes selling it an unhappy process. The thing is, when it was just the two of us, it was perfect. It could not be better. When the little girl was born, we combined the office/library with the music room. When the little boy was born, we moved our bedroom into the office/library/music room. All three rooms were now true bedrooms. And since our house has no hallways (a design I consider to be brilliant), all rooms (including dining room, kitchen, and sunroom) branch off the living room. This means that if two little children are sleeping, we can’t watch TV or listen to music out in the living room. So, we have put a little TV and DVD player and a receiver in the bedroom/office/library/music room. The stack of AV equipment over the computer desk reaches the ceiling. We watch in bed.

So we have outgrown the house with people. But with people come things. The kids acquire and outgrow clothes at a dizzying pace. Kids come with equipment, too. Pack ‘n’ Plays, car seats, strollers, crib, big girl bed, diaper tables, rocking chairs, dressers, shelves, shelves, shelves.

I once had a dream. The natural resources of the world were being harvested by giant combines that mowed them down and sprayed them into the back of giant dump trucks. The dump trucks backed up to factories and released their loads. Out of the other end, a spigot on the factory poured manufactured goods into a store called “All-Mart”. Citizens raced to the store, filled up carts with plastic drivel and trucked them to their houses. It was a lot of work that required a lot of people, but the people managed to be effective. The houses were on a two-dimensional flow chart, and funnel-like slides jutted out the bottom of the houses, joined together to form one massive pipe, and ended in a big pit of the earth. The houses acted like giant coffee filters as they took in the pristine goods and then spit them out seconds later as useless rot into the waste pipe. It was a very efficient system. It was a like a monster that was eating itself.

Anyway, we cut the waste funnel off at our house. Instead, we store it all in the garage. We can’t park in the garage, and we have rarely been able to do so for seven years.

Let me digress for a minute to tell the history of this garage.

August 2001 We move into the house. The garage acts as a holding place while we unpack.

September 2001 We put a fence around three sides of the garage and pen our two dogs there. Garage is cleaned out and we park in it.

October 2001 We realize that there is a good part of the day in which there is no shade around the fenced sides of the garage. Dogs are hot. We extend the fence to enclose the side door. Garage becomes a two-car doghouse.

November 2001 Car gets scratched. Car moves out. One dog is given away (after freaking out a neighbor.) We get a new dog to help keep up the doghouse.

March 2002 Police come after new dog nips neighbor. New dog leaves. The faithful Australian Shepherd remains in her mansion.

Summer of 2002 Rats discover dog food and bird seed in garage. We don’t know about it because we never go in there anymore.

Spring of 2003 We discover rat colony after finding one drowned in the dog’s water bucket. Begin warfare. (There’s a-whole-nother story for a-whole-nother time here.)

October 2004 Little girl born.

August 2005 Australian Shepherd goes to live on a farm. Spend two weeks cleaning out piles of dog hair and seven dried rat carcasses that I had not found previously. (There’s another story here…later, though).

September 2005 Park in garage.

May 2006 Kitchen floods and must be completely redone. Garage becomes work zone. Extra cabinets are stored in garage until we decide if we are going to move or sell them. Also, little girl begins outgrowing clothes, toys, and paraphernalia, which is stacked in garage until a yard sale can be formed. Can no longer park in garage.

October 2006 Little boy born. Garage piles grow vertically and laterally. Cabinets are buried.

Spring 2007 We think about moving. We shuffle anything we can live without (i.e. board games, portfolios, exersaucers) to the garage so that we can show the house. Can no longer walk in garage. Must use complicated system of rappelling ropes and pulleys to navigate interior. Begin to contemplate arson. (OK, that’s a joke. I mean, I did have wishes of it burning, but I would never do it. If it burns somehow, it wasn’t me. I can just see this blog showing up in court.)

David Thoreau. He figured it out. He moved to Walden in his late 20’s and built a simple house. One room, one table, a bed, and three chairs. When he totaled up all of his possessions to penny, he owned $28.12½ worth of necessities. In general, he did not count monetary value. He considered an object’s true value—“the amount of what I call life that must be exchanged for it,” he wrote, and “My greatest skill has been to want but little.” He ate simple, plain food that was probably low in cholesterol. He had three beautiful stones on his desk, but they kept gathering dust. He penned, “I found, however, that I had to dust them each day—while the furniture of my mind was still undusted.” So he threw them out. He believed that it takes a while for clothes to really fit a person’s body, and he felt sorry for well-to-do people that threw their clothes away before they could get comfortable.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity.

How do I—with so much—feel jealous of someone with so little? Oh how the pendulum swings! I know that if I lived like Thoreau did, I would probably have the same reaction that he did. After two years at Walden, Thoreau began to feel restless with his experiment. Perhaps because he became so fully recharged after all his days of watching fish swim or ants fight or grass grow that he was ready to become fully productive.

Moderation in all things? A little balance?

OK. I tend to exaggerate. Our house is not as bad as all that. I am really not living in a landfill. That’s just a picture of the frustration I have with the excesses. And many of those things were necessary to begin with. I mean, I can’t just say, “All right kids. We’re not buying you anymore clothes that you will outgrow.” And, honestly, 99% of those clothes were given to us. I should be overflowing with gratefulness. The kitchen cabinets were given to us, too, and they are very nice! Why do I complain?

Things I Want to Keep
1. The kids.
2. The coffeemaker.
3. All of our musical instruments.
4. The computers.
5. Our pots and pans. I really like our pots and pans.
6. Books and scrapbooks.
7. The riding lawn mower. I push-mowed this acre of wet grass for 5 years, and I’m done with that. Besides, the riding mower is just so fun.

Things With Which I Have No Quarrel
1. The tools. They are useful.
2. The devices that play music. I enjoy music.
3. The spice racks.
4. The bed.
5. The table and chairs.
6. Some of the coffee cups.

Things That I Wish Could Evaporate
1. Everything in the computer desk.
2. Everything under the computer desk.
3. Everything on the computer desk.
4. Everything behind the computer desk.
5. Everything under the bed.
6. Everything in the garage.
7. Everything in the basement.
8. Clocks.

Of course, if we sold the house and bought something bigger than this 1200 square foot paradise, we could fit all these trinkets into nooks and crannies and all would be well.