footprints

Quincy and Katie and John joined Adam and I for dinner tonight (quiche with kale, squash, and zucchini), around my new table. The good news is, the table seats five pretty comfortably, and should seat six equally well. The even better news is, the more I'm in this new space, the more I like it.

Seven hundred square feet, by American standards, is pretty small living. Especially when sharing that space with a roommate. But the house is arranged well, and there's room for what a person needs. And, as a bonus, there's not much room to acquire unneccessary crap. I remember Lisa saying that after she and Fritz moved from a relatively big place in DC to a much smaller space that their use of the rooms was relatively unchanged. In other words, they didn't live much differently--the change was more a matter of scaling down than it was a matter of giving up necessary space.

Don't get me wrong: I love a vaulted ceiling. But a vaulted ceiling (to take just one example of what's currently considered to be a relatively standard element in new construction) means additional materials for building, additional empty space that needs to be heated, and additional time for cleaning and maintenence.

Maybe I'm just trying to convince myself to be happy with what I can afford at this point in my life, but I think it's more than that. There's a satisfaction is living compactly and in making things fit within bounded space. I realize that my lifestyle is nowhere near as compact as that of the families from the old ranch- and farmhouses scattered across Wyoming, families of five or six or more who managed to grow up and grow old together in a house with two or three bedrooms and a single bathroom. But I'm doing alright.