What's Good About Small Things

(This is an old post that I am finally getting added.)

This morning I woke up in “my” new house. The house I stayed in when in Spencer, Iowa finally sold. But my landlord (can you call him that when he doesn’t charge?) bought another house just a block away.

With only one week between closings, and that week spent in my landlord’s summer cabin which is also in the neighborhood, I was barely able to grasp the fact that I was moving. It finally sunk in when I drove past the first house and saw a couple setting up their furniture in the front room...

So this morning, as I tried to sort out where I was, the bedroom finally came under scrutiny. “It’s pretty small,” I thought. The air mattress takes up about 80% of the room. And the remaining 20% is wasted space because the folding closet doors swing out over it. Oh, well. Why would I need extra space in the bedroom anyway?

I took two steps out the bedroom door and was in the kitchen in front of the sink. There are ruffled yellow curtains at that window similar to what I always pictured in my future “dream home.” And the pot my little aloe plant is in, exactly matches the yellow in the curtains. Funny how that seemed to make the plant look at home.

The view out that kitchen window is the highlight of “my” new little house. Just outside the window are loads of day lilies blooming away. (My Grandpa Minikus calls them “orchridges.” Familiar flowers make any place seem like home to me.) The flowers reach up past the sill and make bouquets in the window. Just past the day lilies is a narrow blacktop alley. Then comes the neighbor’s white picket fence with a row of perennial flowers planted all along front. Picture perfect!

After getting a drink, I took two more steps in the same direction to use the bathroom. It’s the kind of bathroom where you can sit on the toilet and spit in the sink. Comes in handy when you are in a hurry trying to brush your teeth and accomplish other things at the same time.

Back in my room I realized that I was going to have to keep all my “office” stuff in the living room. Usually my bedroom is where I do all my paperwork... there is no room for a desk in this cabin... ok, so I’ll sit on the couch in the living room... two steps to the kitchen and two steps to the right and I am in the “living room.”

The wooden floor was painted brown sometime recently, and where that layer of brown is peeling up I can see the gray underneath. I’m glad someone painted it brown instead! The walls are a creamy color that borders on chiffon yellow, so that looks much better with dark brown than the slate-gray color that is trying to re-appear on the floor.

The floor in the living room is nearly covered by a 5’x8’ area rug that is a shocking leopard print. I used two of my moving boxes for “furniture” by “papering” them with black garbage bags (I didn’t have any paper sacks... but the black plastic blends in pretty well with the black and brown leopard print rug). I put my printer on one box against one wall, and I put my philodendron and mother-in-law tongue plants on the other box in front of the double windows. My friend Jenny sent me a red silk cloth to help cover my “furniture” when she heard about my garbage bags. She knew red is my favorite color and thought that it would add a bright flower effect to my “jungle” of black plastic bags, plants, and leopard rug. It works!

The curtains in the bedroom, living room, and bathroom are all white sheers that are way too long for the windows. The previous owner tied them up with nylon strings. I still had my spider plant to put somewhere... so I bought a metal hook thing from Walmart and screwed it into the wood door jam and hung the plant there using a “macrame” plant hanger that I made out of the nylon strings that tied up the curtains. To hold the curtains back I clipped hem markers from my sewing box on them. It worked!

There is a striped hide-a-bed couch on the back wall of the living room. It’s actually really comfortable as a couch and not bad as a bed. There is a rip in the back on one side, so I lay my red lap quilt across the corner when I am not using it. Books line the walls along the floor. That is handy.

The refrigerator is the size of the one I had in the camper trailer in Texas, and it makes an ominous whistling noise when it runs. But it started up again when the power came back on after a bad storm we had; so that’s cool. And the stove is also like the one I had in the trailer, in that I light it with a match. But I have always liked cooking on gas stoves where you can see the heat and know exactly what you are doing when you cook; so that’s hot. Although the oven doesn’t get hot enough and the cake I made for my Mom’s birthday was still pudding after 25 min of baking... it eventually got done and I pulled it out to discover that the floor is so un-level in “my” house that the cake ended up 1 inch deep on one side and 1 1/2 inches deep on the other! It was so funny!

Two more steps and you are right back where you started in this tour of my new little house. Everything is close at hand and there is very little time needed to clean it! And it already feels like home. I appreciate how God always provides a space in this world for me. And I appreciate the family that is letting me stay in their cabin for free!

Oh, here is a picture of the outside. That “pine tree,” on the right of the house, someone carved from a stump! And I moved my potted flowers from the last place to this porch. Also interesting to note: the address here is 421 Lincoln Ave. When I was growing up, I lived in Council Bluffs, Iowa at 321 Lincoln Ave. How ironic!