Boyle - Simple matters: living with less and ending up with more

CONTENTS

Introduction: Making a Home

Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free, tis a gift to come down where you ought to be.

Shaker dance song by Joseph Brackett

Many minimalist narratives begin with too much. Too much disposable income, too many unnecessary purchases, too much stuffand not enough happiness. This isnt one of those narratives.

My story begins in an echoey old apartment in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina. It begins in a kitchen that came complete with too-tall-by-far wooden cabinets coated in ten layers of paint, pitted Formica countertops, and palmetto bugs (translation: cockroaches, southern-style) that skittered in twenty different directions as soon as the lights flickered on. There were more palmetto bugs than there was anything else.

I was a few days past twenty-three. James was a few months past twenty-five. A year and a half later, I would write my first blog post. Eventually wed leave North Carolina for Providence, Rhode Island, where Id go to graduate school and James would finish his masters thesis. Wed move together into a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. Id begin to write about life in that place. After a year there, wed get married. Wed have a babyand need to move again. But before all that, there was our beginning. Our beginning, in our first apartment.

I arrived to that apartment for the first time after dark.

James had found it several weeks before, while I was living abroad. Ours had been a long-distance relationship, our time together limitedand made richerby our experiences in far-flung places. On dusky, chardonnay-scented bicycle rides through the vineyards of southern Burgundy, Id made up my mind to join James in North Carolina once the school year ended. Hed be starting a graduate program, Id be re-acclimating to life in the U.S. and searching for work.

James sent me pictures of the apartment hed found for us to live in. He knew what to highlight. The fireplace and the bay windows and the porch with a swing. There werent any pictures of the palmetto bugs.

We exchanged emails about what wed do to fix broken screens and hide a gas heater that took up half of the living room. We didnt yet know about the transient man with a penchant for poking his head through the bay window. Or the neighbor who would, one night, build a raging bonfire in the ten-foot space between our two tinderbox Queen Anne houses. We didnt know about the bathroom ceiling that would eventually collapse during our tenure, or the stove that wed come to learn leaked carbon monoxide. When we arrived, we only knew we had to make it our own.

And so, more-or-less fresh off the plane from a year of teaching elementary school in France, I found a mattress and a box spring in the bedroom made up with clean, ecru-colored sheets. James had bought them himself, sprawling on mattress after mattress until he found one that he thought would suit us both. There was a couch that hed begged off a couple moving their young family cross-country. There was a washer and dryer that hed hustled into our back room via a hastily rented U-Haul. In the kitchen: two saucepans.

Two summers before, James had spent the summer on Edisto Island, South Carolina. The local Piggly Wiggly had been running a promotion with Royal Doulton, and hed saved up the points he accumulated with each receipt and purchased the stainless-steel pans. Hed been toting them around as he went from seasonal work contract to seasonal work contractcrisscrossing the country while chasing sea turtle research projects and ski slopes.

We were adultsor so wed told our parents. We tried to prove it to ourselves, the best way that we could, as we made a life together in a state hundreds of miles from the places where wed grown up. Because adults had homes. And homes were more than just four walls and a bed. And so I unzipped my suitcases and hung a few dresses in the closet. Somewhere a palmetto bug skittered across the floor.

Making a home is hard work, and for some reason its underappreciated. Its a way to make sense of things. As we figured out how to pay for our rent, we also spent hours talking about dishes, about how to sweep scattered insect carcasses properly out the banging screen door. We lay in bed and daydreamed about what curtains to hang.

On lonely afternoons after work, I would prowl around antique shops looking for a chair or a table lamp or a mirror that would make our place feel like a home. In the hours when I wasnt working, I busied myself with projects: removing the broken, ill-fitting shades in each window and hanging up curtains insteadgauzy ones, bought cheaply and hung just one to each window to save on the cost.

We bought a mop, and James scrubbed our hardwood floors. He did it over and over and over again until we could walk on them without our bare feet sticking with each step. Even after the last wash, the mop water still turned gray.

In our first week together, I spent precious pennies on a new blue-and-white-striped cloth shower curtain. I hung up the curtain and then decided that the tub looked dingy by comparison. Bleach, I reasoned, would do the trick. While I sprayed at the ancient layer of grime in the tub, an accidental stream hit the cloth curtain, which became specked with orange before my eyes. I slumped myself onto the dirty bathroom floor in defeat. It was only a shower curtain. And yet it had come to signify a lot more: an attempt to be grown-up. A stab at making a grungy place feel like home. A triumph of penny-pinching. I called my mom and I cried.

James left me empty beer bottles filled with flowers on the kitchen windowsill. We began untangling the brambles in the front garden. We propped surfboards in corners for safekeeping and... decor. We bought terracotta pots and filled them with ivy. We hung our clothes in the narrow shared closet. We hauled home, cleaned, and rejected a series of shabby dressers until we settled on a pair to sand and paint and love. I bought a quilt that cost as much as my weekly paycheck, which is to say, not much.

There were seemingly endless decisions to make and more choices than we could have imagined. We needed a mop, but which mop? We needed soap, but which soap? Flour: white or wheat? Napkins: cloth or paper? Detergent: liquid or powder? I remember retail paralysis under the unflattering fluorescent lights of store after store.

But it wasnt just about the stuff. Everything we did in that space felt imbued with meaning. Are you really going to hang that, there? You fold your underwear how? And we were learning. We were deciding what habits wed borrow from our parents and which wed reject. We were learning what habits we would borrow from each other. And what we would cut from whole cloth for ourselves. There wasnt anyone telling us what to do, but at the same time it felt as if everyone was telling us what to do: a lifetime of often-contradictory advice about what was nice to have and what was essential to have.

James grumbled about tofu, and I turned my nose up at steak. Hungrily, we worked out what we would make for dinner. We both loved eating by candlelight. We bought candles and put them in the center of our table and we lit them. It didnt matter if it was our third night in a row eating pasta; we lit candles every night.

There were missteps. Things collected that we didnt really need. Money spent that might have been saved. Arguments that wed one day learn to navigate.

And what we learned in that first apartment we carried with us to our second one. We settled on a brand of soap. We bought flour and a jar to keep it in. We made choices about cable and Internet and electricity and gas. We learned how to shop at the farmers market. We found a local grocery store. We took long rides to the beach. We tried to give each other space to breathe. Sometimes we didnt, and we learned from that, too.