Just the Right Amount of Broken
My Tiny House, Part 2.1
My wee Tiny House arrives this week! Obviously, going tiny has material consequence, as limited space demands careful and sometimes tough choices beyond the obvious. Bed = yes. Old clothes I’ve been meaning to donate anyway = no. Most of my stuff falls somewhere between the clear yes or no, imbued with meaning and memories and significance and life force I hadn’t thought much about until tasked with eliminating two-thirds of my belongings. I suspect this is true for most of us.
My deadline is three days from now. I’ve had nearly eleven months to make my selections, which is time enough to overanalyze, second-guess, and rethink. Anyone who has watched the show Tiny House Nation knows that while the builders work on structural integrity and custom solutions, the affable host meets with the clients to downsize their belongings. These interrogations into themselves often surprise the soon-to-be-tiny-dweller, unearthing strongly-held yet invisible values.
Examples include the guy who had not faced the extent to which his sense of self was reliant on his vintage record collection, or the woman who hadn’t realized that a dozen Kentucky Derby glasses were the final thread holding together her memory of beloved grandparents. Let’s face it: some things make it easy to let go and some are impossible. Our values and our lives rest in the hard work between.
Such was the case of my dehydrator with the broken top. My daughter gave it to me our first Christmas after her father and I separated. She and her dad had gone to all the possibly relevant stores in Southern and Central Rhode Island, at last finding a saleable dehydrator somewhere north of Cranston. (That’s a little Rhode Island joke, as Providence is pretty much the only thing north of Cranston.) They — this still-hurting man I had recently left and our sensitive 7-year old daughter in the throes of her own social challenges — could have given up and found something easier, but they just kept going.
When I opened the carefully wrapped but slightly crumpled box, it was clear the dehydrator’s top corner had been smashed and the plastic shattered, perhaps explaining why it was the sole remaining one of its kind in the entire state of Rhode Island.
Every so often, I think about replacing it, but always reconsider. Dehydrators function through two elements: heat and air. Mine may have a little more airflow than the designers intended, but the heat is fine and it has dried my herbs and apples and cherry tomatoes perfectly well for over 20 years.
Interlude — What Didn’t Make the Cut (a listicle)
A dozen or so Livestrong-style plastic bracelets. Each one free to me, branded with a different practitioner’s logo and slogan. I’d held on to them as talismans and with a sense of loyalty. I do hope they are recyclable.
School supplies. If you count Kindergarten through Ph.D., I spent 25 years of my life as a student and even more than that as a classroom teacher. Lowkey hoarding school supplies was a way of life. Repeat after me: there is no room for all these school supplies in your tiny house.
So many books. So very many books. Most of them I’d read, but some of them not. I limited myself to one box labeled TBR (“To Be Read”); anything not compelling enough got donated along with books I would never actually read again.
Some really nice furniture. Tiny home living means saying goodbye the dining room table with extension and four matching chairs I custom-designed, a massive dresser given to me by my ex-husband on my 30th birthday when we were freshly married and full of hope and still living in Indiana, the writing desk and matching bookcase I treated myself to after our divorce. Most have been distributed among family and friends with blessings of more love and long lives.
Most of my knives. Turns out I really only use a paring knife and a Santoku-style Shun and don’t even ask me about that bulky knife block (it went to my niece, along with all the knives to fill it).
Singleton earrings, their partners long gone and long ago grieved.
Comforters, quilts, blankets, other bedding. Some of them I had actually knit myself, the donation box an archeology of my learning process. It was stuff I’d held on to just in case. You know, just in case twenty people suddenly need to spend the night in my tiny house in the middle of nowhere down a dirt road.
Insulated travel mugs. Apparently I had accumulated over a dozen, when I truly only need one. But then, this one is special to my favorite coffee shop in Vermont, that one is from the theatre where my daughter apprenticed and who treated her well during COVID and I can still see her name on it, and a third is from the theatre where she works now. Okay, so I really need three insulated travel mugs — but that’s better than twelve, right?
Seventeen water bottles. Some mementos of long-ago vacations with my daughter in Glacier and Yosemite, some bought in last minute airport panics in Albuquerque and Seattle, some acronymed with outfitter logos: REI, EMS, URE. None of them are necessary anymore, as long as I still have my Camelbak for hiking and those three travel mugs (see above).
My entire academic life. My 30+ year university career fit into one box with a bit of room to spare, and is now headed for the shed at my parents’ house. All the diplomas, fancy awards, books and journals with my articles and chapters. My bound dissertation, the dissertations written by the students I directed, framed pictures of my students and me at their doctoral hooding ceremonies, my own academic regalia worn with near-religious fervor to each and every hooding ceremony because I felt I could not attend my own. It’s just not me anymore. Some days I do wonder if it ever was.
As you probably guessed, the smushed dehydrator made the cut. Even twenty years later, I still feel the need to honor the extraordinary effort of my daughter and her dad during a rough time to bring me an unsightly gift that works just fine. Each of its layers are packed carefully in the same box with my canning supplies, with extra bubble wrap for the lid so that it can stay precisely, exactly as shattered as it is.
It’s just the right amount of broken.
I prefer that to illusions of being “fully healed” or having the sort of resiliency that bounces you back “good as new.” My skin bears the physical scars of old wounds — several inches on my left shoulder from the removal of slow-growing cancerous basal cells, two small incisions from a laparoscopic ACL replacement — but they no longer hurt. The same is true of my emotional wounds: the markers are there, but the sharpest pains have subsided.
Just the right amount of broken is the opposite of erasing the past. Rather, it acknowledges a smoothing out over time, memories still carried but lightly. It announces vulnerability, humanness, interconnectedness; it proclaims that I’m still functional, just perhaps a bit more fragile. Just the right amount of broken.
Isn’t that what we all want to be?