dreaming little

You know, when some people dream of buying a new house, they dream big. Twice the size, twice the amenities. Luxury fixtures, state-of-the-art systems, swimming pools, hot and cold running champagne from every tap. A McMansion in the suburbs, maybe, or a glamorous deep-woods retreat. Me, though. When I dream, I dream Tumbleweed or Chapin, in terms of my bungalow court, which many of you have heard about many times now, but also in terms of paring down. You know, somehow finding something acceptable to do with the spare dining table, one that doesn't involve having two dining spaces for one person. Getting rid of the entire cabinet of stationery, and the thousand and one perfectly ordinary t-shirts, and the extra set of dishes that never gets used. Fitting everything in to a thousand square feet with room to spare, which let's face it, a thousand square feet is as much as one person really needs. Even someone with a fair number of books, none of which I ever dream of tossing over the side of the basket.

You wouldn't think it'd be so hard to do, would you? Maybe you're the sort of person I envy, the sort who gets rid of that superfluous stuff without a pang or a second thought. But I'm not that person -- even though I've purged before, it'll never come naturally -- and so I look at the tidy plans and sigh wistfully over the cleverness of them, and I look around at my pretty cottage which while definitely a cottage is on the large end of the cottage spectrum, and I do love it painfully much, but I still wish, sometimes, that my life were more compact.