The Road Less Traveled

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost - Mountain Interval - 1916

I belong to a small house forum, where there's been a lively discussion going on, sparked by one man's insistence that we have no choice but to continue with our present levels of resource consumption. He can see no other options.

Despite numerous members (including yours truly) telling him that we had already altered our patterns of consumption quite successfully he refuses to believe it can be done.

Quote from Robert Fritz

Maybe those of us who strive to live low on the resource totem pole are the "Uber-Liberal greenie eco-freaks" he called us in derision; but in my eyes we (personally) are not yet green or freaky enough.

To my distress a life of simplicity (such as we live it) still requires a heck of a lot of stuff and the exchange of a great deal of money. There's rent, the power bill, the propane, the cell phone, the interwebs, groceries, clothes, expensive medications which the provincial plan doesn't cover, all things we cannot live safely or comfortably without unless we move ourselves right along to the shopping cart/refrigerator-box-under-a- bridge-domicile. How do you simplify what has become inherently and almost inescapably complex?

While I keep talking about reducing the amount of stuff we own, so far my ambition has outweighed action. We have cleared out two drawers this week, which is better than nothing, but not a lot better. This is not a problem of reluctance to let go, but one of the strength and energy to sort through the stuff and move it along.

When I get despondent about our slow and bumpy road toward simplicity I pop over and spend time with Peace Pilgrim, who reassures me that; "... progress is [never] over. ... it's as though the central figure of the jigsaw puzzle of your life is complete and clear and unchanging, and around the edges other pieces keep fitting in. There is always a growing edge, but the progress is harmonious."

The central figure of this jigsaw puzzle is an intention to live more lightly, and there is a continuing but ever so glacial progress toward an ever more light state. (Trust my jigsaw puzzle to be one which has 5000 pieces.) But it just feels weird. We have followed the road less traveled, to be sure, but we have ended up in never-never land - with too much stuff to fit in with the 100 Things crowd, and far too little to look anything like "normal" to the village householder with his 2500 sq ft house, three cars, power boat and snowmobiles for each member of the family.

I guess I just have to admit that we are not normal in any sense of the word and probably never have been. But we are what we are, and there's no point pretending otherwise. As Frost wrote, the road we chose to follow is the grassy one, and there's not a lot of company.

Organizing the Bits

We've found that the secret for living in a tiny space is organized storage, i.e. not storage space like this. I have had beside my wee rocker the most unlikely "table" one could think of, a carpeted cat scratching post/hidey-hole thingie. We bought it for Salvador several years ago but he's too big to get inside it. He poked his head in, turned around and said, "What the hell?", and then ignored it. So I inherited it.

Sadly it usually looks just like it does here. Piled with books, magazines, papers, remotes, cords, and various bits and pieces, all threatening junkslide at any moment. I lose all manner of stuff inside the two cubbies and can never find anything when I want it.

It's been driving me bananas and I decided I wanted to replace it with a narrow shelf under the window. But I couldn't find a six inch deep, 32" long, 17" high shelf anywhere. So we decided to build one. When we went to town on Thursday we bought two 1 x 6 pine boards, and yesterday we measured them off and Tony cut the pieces. It was quite cold out, so we brought the pieces inside to assemble them, then I took it back outside on the deck to paint it.

My idea was to have three shelves, plus the top surface. On the top, a three inch high decorative molding (a screen door molding bought for a project almost 10 years ago and never used) will keep items from walking off the edge. This provides a spot for my coffee cup in the morning, the cell phone, the remotes, etc. Next a shelf which holds small, shallow boxes for organizing small items, like Sal's glucose monitor, a note pad, computer bits, camera, etc. The next shelf is little deeper and will hold larger boxes. I'm recycling several empty cat food cases to use as boxes. I have some pretty origami paper and will cover them, so they look nice.

The bottom shelf holds two baskets for camera charger, pens, pencils and markers, tape rolls, and the rest of the shelf is devoted to reference and paperback books. Our paperbacks take space in the larger bookcase that could be better used by larger books, and there are several reference books I like to have close at hand that have usually ended up stacked on the floor.

The cat thingie went out on the deck for Sal to sit on. I thought he might ignore it, since he never used it inside, but he immediately took up residence on it and laid there off and on all evening. So everyone's happy.

We're feeling quite proud of ourselves, because it was (for us) a big job, and it worked out exactly the way we wanted.