By Coral Serene Anderson

“It’s a crisp little block home,” my husband chortles.

He is repeating the brokerage blurb we read together the day before, laughing. At the moment, I don’t feel like laughing. We are buying a house. No, we are talking about buying a house. And I am feeling the weight of adulthood and its enjoining twin, responsibility.

“Crisp. As in corn flakes.” I attempt lightheartedness. “Or a cracker. But a house should not be crisp.”

He takes my hand as we walk over the soggy, uneven stretch of grass between our car and the tiny 480-square-foot house. There is an attractively potted palm just right of the door. Cute, really. In the way that palm trees at Christmastime are cute.

It is wintertime, 2007. There are tenants in the block home and, since the seller is in Mexico, they have to be there to let us in. So at six o’clock on a Thursday evening we are standing inside the house looking around, feeling awkward because the tenant is lingering by the kitchen sink watching us. Are we supposed to engage him? I wonder. Instead, after a brief introduction, I try to pretend he’s not there. It takes concentration to imagine myself living here. My fifteen month-old daughter is squealing and has taken off after one of his cats, which gives me a moment to look around.

The walls are white, textured, and the plaster around each window has been rounded. This last detail gives both rooms of the bungalow a soft aspect. And it is warm inside. Sometimes cinder block structures leak heat like a sieve, but in this home they are insulating. Which encourages me, because efficient heating will counterbalance replacing the cigarette laden, ivy-colored carpet that will undoubtedly mean another chip out of our liquid assets.

“Nicer than I thought it would be,” says our realtor to me in a low tone reminiscent of sharing a secret. I must look stressed out, because he clarifies his statement. “More ample, I mean, for such a small space.”

Small space. The words are another layer on the growing stack of items I need to think about, to mull over. Are we, am I, really committed to the acts of simplifying and downsizing beyond reading Back Home magazine? And why? Lately, these have become earnestly important questions. Even the idea of buying a house has given me great pause. A part of me - let’s call her Ideological Integrity - is calling for reflection. She is demanding that I acknowledge the principles I claim to hold and insisting that I evaluate my willingness to carry them out.

The proto-type tiny home. Canadian down-sizing!

I’ve negotiated my way around furniture and into the next room, the bedroom, and its adjoining bathroom. The realtor has followed me and turns on the bathroom light; a fan goes on. He nods his head.

“Wired separately. That’s a plus if you’re thinking of retrofitting the grid electricity for an alternative source of power.”

We told him we would love to be off the grid. Another ideological layer to sort through and sift through. Is a retrofit practical? What will it cost? Is it a priority for us?

“For two rooms, a couple of kerosene lanterns and some candles should do the trick.”

I’m joking, but I can tell he isn’t picking up on that since he is nodding rather seriously and looking the other way. So I head back to the living room.

“Can we see outside?” I ask.

“Sure,” says the tenant from the living room. He is already heading that direction with a cigarette cupped discretely in his hand.

I pick up my daughter and plop her securely into our Ergo front pack. The realtor hands me his high-powered flashlight, probably because I’m the one carrying a baby, for which I am grateful.

So now outside, I am the first to walk over a flagstone path and through a tidy little gate, the first to admire the solid old walnut tree that adds grace as well as waves of root- terrain to the textured upheaval of the backyard. We could do so much with this outside space, I think.

A large space. The men are talking about exterior paint. I stand in the middle of the backyard moving the flashlight beam from the east end of the fence to the west. There is space for our composter; space for my husband to build a garage from recycled building materials; space for my dream: a cedar writing cabin with a layer of indigenous greenery, a living roof. In this slice of land, even this humble .20 acre parcel, there seems to me an embodiment of possibility. Possibility for our family ideology to find root-room, and for my daily eco-rhetoric to hang out laundry on a line and build a cold-frame for lettuces. This fraction of an acre seems to me the tangible face of potential.

I turn back to our small company, who have moved on to discuss how to un-mold a roof on the cheap. It is so cold that my husband’s breath and the tenant’s cigarette smoke appear of equal viscosity in the air. The tenant is affable.

“I meant to tell you all to watch out,” he says kindly. “We have a dog.”

He is making a good effort at pretending to smoke outside. Although the carpet has already given his habits away, it is a gesture we appreciate.

“Thanks,” says my husband.

I check my shoes with the flashlight.

“You know, we heat the whole place with one space heater. These block homes, you got ‘em done right and the effect is almost like radiant heating. We pay less for the heating bill than for a tank of gas,” the tenant offers, exuberant about the insulating properties of the cinder block walls.

“And we love small spaces,” I match his exuberance, but my comment is slightly out of context.

But my affirmation is genuine. Natural insulation means a limited need for heating or cooling, a matter of sustainability that revives my excitement about the tiny house. Ecology is more than exuberance, it is a daily choice to interact with my environment in a way consistent with my shoulds. If such a little home reduces our overall energy consumption by at least 75% and eliminates our need for natural gas, it is the kind of home I should chose. A kind of ecology of the home.

We thank the tenant for his time, say our good-nights, hear our realtor list for us the steps to take if we want to make an offer. My husband is squeezing my hand and I am tugging his, eager to go. Small space. Large space. The words are walking with us past a pretty, bare-limbed tree at the front. I notice two weathered bird-feeders on its branches; they appear to be vacant. It is, after all, December.

Now, with the three of us buckled in the car, I take my shoes off entirely.

“I like it,” I say, and my husband nods.

He is driving us away from the modest little house, and the knowledgeable realty broker, and the real estate investment with loads of creative potential that could soon be ours. He is being unusually quiet. A giddy sort of quiet.

Indeed, the crisp little block home has moved up in our estimation from an initial, smug mockery to the vaunted status of an intended purchase. All 480 square feet of it. I know this without his having said it.

“We could tile the floor,” I say , because it seems urgent to me. Up front, if we buy this home and before moving in, something must be done about that carpet.

“Do you know how much work that will be?” he replies. “I’m thinking discount carpet. There’s a store on Martin Luther King Boulevard. Who were those guys who did our neighbor’s floors? Can’t be that much - a day job, maybe.”

“No, no,” I am shaking my head. “Why wouldn’t we do it? We’re not above a little labor. On principle.”

He grins.

“You’re talking about sweat equity.” He seems approving.

A friend of ours is a tile-layer, another friend a contractor, another handy with a welder and good for carpentry. Another friend does drywall. We could scrounge for recycled materials, re-paint the walls inside with earthen plaster - I even saved a recipe for a dusky-rose colored plaster that I found in a 2006 issue of Mother Earth News. By-passing the largess of commercial giants like Home Depot for the modest price of resourcefulness, recycling, and hard work, the act of downsizing would force our ecological hand. And I like the idea of our hand being tested.

These are the assertions Ideological Integrity has been prodding me to make. Daily and in so many areas of my mind, I quiet her. Yet, what other decision in our life could solidify our philosophical commitment to simplicity as that of purchasing a home the size of an average American’s master bedroom?

“How much work can tiling be?” I find myself assuring my husband in an attempt to regulate my involuntary tendency toward idealism with facts, “It is only 480 square feet!”

In the spirit of reductionism among our 21st Century contemporaries, most of whom live as if convinced they need a bedroom for every child and a separate house for their cars, purchasing a house of this size would gain us the verve of being economically counterculture. In terms of ecology, we would be taking from our environment only what two rooms would require, a sort of counter-consumerism. And in the language of sustainability, we would be reducing our carbon footprint by the sheer collapse of square footage.

“What are our principles worth?” I find myself voicing my internal conflict to my husband.

And I am looking for an answer. Because the part of me that is materially honest and not at all concerned about integrity wants new, new, new. It wants the McMansion in Lake Oswego. It wants not to conserve, but to expand. Wants not only to buy my daughter a Barbie doll, but the house and car and horse and Barbie Spa too.

“Our parents are going to think we’re crazy,” he says. A good answer.

“But practically…” I say, not sure where this train of thought is going. “They’ll understand. We’re buying within our means.”

Within our means, at this juncture of our mutual economic life, means to buy a house for under $140,000. Within connotes an economic, ecological, and aesthetic parameter that must encompass the both of us and a toddler who will be sharing 480 square feet of inside space, along with her own assortment of pint-sized furniture and child-type baubles.

Our vehicle rattles past the verdant yards and restoration homes on the cusp the Richmond neighborhood, where we rent.

“Grass or sod?” my husband asks as we pass home after home with well maintained lawns.

“Grass.” I don’t hesitate. “From seed.”

Because we’re working from a premise, I add internally, but can’t find the words to say it. For me, it is a premise beyond economics. And that premise is the concept of Orthopraxy: the orthodoxy - a body of principles comprising our system of beliefs - combined with the working out of those beliefs in daily practice. Orthopraxy.

It’s a lovely word, a lovely ideal connoting personal integrity. And Lady Idealogical Integrity within me would be proud; she would give a deep and charming curtsy in approbation were I to live out of the premise of Orthopraxy. It is a word we apply to the non-hypocritical people of our acquaintanceship, those who live out of principle rather than passion. The kind of people we openly admire and privately envy: Orthopractically perfect people.

My husband starts a round of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to our daughter’s great delight. He sings, “And on this lot we got some urban chickens,” with a sustained timbre. In 1988, the average cost of a dozen eggs was $0.65. Today, the average is reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to be $1.50 a dozen. I don’t know what store the Stats guy at the Bureau shops at, but for cage-free, veg-fed eggs I routinely pay $2.49. We’ve been talking about the benefits of raising your own urban chickens for over two years.

Every family has an Orthopractic framework, even if their values and their actions are not actually lining up, for which the official term is cognitive dissonance. My husband and I experience such cognitive dissonance on an ongoing basis. Take the urban chicken idea as a supporting fact. Our family, to use ourselves as an example of the “every family” model, has a particularly idealistic orthodoxy. Here is how cognitive dissonance appears, fissure-like, in our lives:

Postulate A We believe in simplicity.

Postulate B If we do not actually pursue simplification of our environment and resources -

B Parenthetical (I.e., if in buying a home we do not downsize, if we do not live within our economic, ecological, and spiritual means)

Postulate C …then we will experience that uncomfortable sensation of cognitive dissonance.

In a word, guilt. The sense that the balance of our family principles and actions are not quite stable - our Orthopraxy would experience vertigo.

So, our theory and our practice now have a crisp little block home and a whole lot of uneven yardage to spar in. In order, you understand, to achieve harmony and balance between the two halves of our existence; to attain a commonly held, ecological feng-shui.

We turn onto our street, my husband wailing “E-I-E-I-OOOOO,” and my little girl laughing hysterically, laughing her beautiful little laugh, her head thrown back in joy.

For us, there is an ecology of relationship incumbent within the economy of 480 square feet. A reduction of space in general, and personal space in particular, would force the appreciation of our interrelations. In effect, a smaller house would offer more opportunity to interact. Which would ensure conflict. Like sweat equity, conflict would force the appreciation of our family’s communication. Closer communion in moments of art and beauty, in moments of suffering when one of us takes ill and therefore so will everyone else within a matter of days, in times when our familial, emotional tenor has changed course toward the depressive, or at moments when the pressures of life would instigate us to either erupt or to grasp hands and steady one another.

Our vision for the crisp little block home with its slice of acreage, its scope of possibility, and its invitation toward a sustained Orthopraxy follows us from our car, across the frost-crisp lawn, up to the door of our rental. I notice the vibrancy of the stars, even above streetlights. It is seven o’clock, my daughter’s bath time.

“There’s no tub,” I say.

Although the shower could be fun, I think. Maybe. But bathing a toddler in it would be a challenge. Orthopraxy. What is a consistent value system worth?

“It’s a sacrifice,” my husband answers.

He looks at me as he closes the door behind us. His eyes are bright and warm, like the soft light of the Christmas tree brightening one corner of our living room. He picks up our daughter, her arms thrown about his neck and face spread in a happy smile. We are her home, and our love for her a complete, sustainable ecology.

For her sake, integrity in our Orthopraxy is worth a tidy block home and a dividable lot. It’s worth the sacrifice for the ecstasy of achieving balance between theory and practice. Worth an Orthopractic downsize, an economy of space, and an operative ecology of the home. Such Ideological Integrities are beyond worthwhile.

“Crisp,” I smile. “Can we find a different adjective?”

Coral Serene Anderson lives and writes in Portland, Oregon. She enjoys the ongoing conversation of life with her husband, Andrew, and their daughter, Poppy Lynn. Coral holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles, a BA from Portland State University, and an AA from Simon’s Rock College of Bard.