Tiny House On The Move

Early in the summer my landlady Marianna told me about her idea to move across the bay to a condo. A condo would be more manageable than the upkeep of a house and yard full of fruit trees. She wanted to rent out the house if the bank would give her another loan to buy the condo. That didn’t work out. I had wanted to buy her house myself. Not so much for the house which was just a two bedroom, but for the yard which was large and wonderfully wild. If I owned the house it would insure that I would always have a place to park the tiny house with an income to offset my costs. So was my reasoning.

I was grateful to Marianna for taking me in those first three years in such a prime location for it had given me time to figure out how to live in my house while allowing me to be close to clients and have the support of Catherine’s house nearby. She had also provided WiFi, water and power. 

The Search

While I was in Thailand she sold the house. She had gotten overwhelmed by the condition of it and wanted a quick out, selling the house for cash to investors. We would have the end of the year to move. She delivered the news with a plate of brownies I could not think of eating as I fought off waves of panic. She listened sympathetically to me vent. 

Just then my friend Karla called me to invite me on a museum date. When I told her of my news she suggested I contact her daughter who lived on a big property in Petaluma. Why not I thought and felt better. At least I had one offer. It was two and a half hours away, but the immediate Bay Area had not become any more tiny-house friendly in the three years I had been living in my tiny. In fact because there were now 300 RVs parked on the streets all over Mountain View and Palo Alto, residents had become even more resistant to any live aboard house on wheels. The long resistance to increased density in these suburbs had now bloomed into the most obscene housing crisis in the nation even as the cities allowed Google and Facebook to add hundreds of thousands of jobs. We would never catch up.

I drove to Petaluma and persuaded Catherine to consider it too, but she wasn’t ready and I couldn’t do it alone. I perused craigslist and drove across the bay to Castro Valley to see a backyard. The town was still legitimately in the Bay Area and the space offered was a big grassy back yard, but the commute traffic over the bridges was sure to be punishing and he wanted $1000 in rent plus utilities. Closer to home the offers were $1000 for ugly concrete yards. One offer was a dilapidated abandoned house renting the driveway for that amount. This so disgusted me I didn’t even contact the owner though the site was only a mile from Catherine’s. It was on the busy Edgewood road approach to 280 and didn’t even have a lockable gate. A week later the price dropped to $750 and a small newish RV trailer was soon parked there.

I put an add on craigslist myself which drew two offers one in Moss Beach and one in Half Moon Bay. The man in Moss Beach was put off by my composting toilet possibly offending his renters since I would be burying the contents or seasoning it in a bin on site depending on my method. The Half Moon Bay property was a commercial yard zoned for agricultural use supporting gardeners and nursery operations. My status would be as a caretaker assisting the man already there. I was quite excited about this possibility as it had an amazing open space behind it overlooking the ocean, but the owner got cold feet about allowing someone else to live there. The county watched commercial properties very closely and he was already housing people in RVs on a property hidden inland that was a commercial landfill. 

My Appearance On TV

Ironically during my state of near homelessness my blog was discovered by organizers of The Tiny Living Festival and I was asked to speak at their California venue as a bonafide tiny house dweller. Capitalizing on my expertise as a professional organizer my topic was ostensibly about how to downsize your stuff to fit into a tiny house. But I made it more a message about how tiny houses are an adjustment to the extravagance of the MacMansion era. A project worth doing to live a simpler life so we're not hogging so much energy and resources. 

In conjunction with my involvement with the festival I was also interviewed for an appearance on the 11 o'clock news for their program Project Home which addresses the housing crisis on a weekly basis. The show gave a brief tour of how I lived in the tiny house and allowed me to stealthily impart a message of eco living while asking my opinion about tiny houses as a solution for the homeless. No the tiny house is not a way to appease our guilt by putting societies most destitute in substandard housing (but by all means allow it and do it right in community with social services). It’s heaps better than nothing of course. People are going to live in this area whether there is housing or not. Many in their cars. I managed to impart an answer without proselytizing and was pleased with how well I came across. You can see for yourself on the programs website.

 A New Town To Consider

Another friend suggested I try to stay on the property I was on so I approached the real estate agent about having me be there to keep an eye out while the property was remodeled. It was not ideal, but I was at the end of my rope and posted my plight to Facebook showing myself gardening the median strip which had won me the approval of the neighborhood. I was staying positive by positioning myself as an asset to override the downer energy of the current housing crisis. I mean why should I be given space when so many were in need? It was a struggle to see myself as uniquely worthy and wanted. I needed to find my own Brigadoon I told my writing group.

My plight prompted two friends in a mountain town on the ocean side of the Santa Cruz mountains to post my add request to their internal neighborhood lists. The town was 35 minutes drive from everything, but it was beautiful and the drive did not involve bridge traffic or much traffic at all. I got two responses immediately. The first response was from a family 10 minutes further down the road in farm country. A bit too far and too remote, but I entertained the idea until the second offer which was right down the street from my friends’ house. The homeowner left such a nice message that I warmed to him immediately and went to meet him. 

Bob greeted me from his woodpile where he cut downed trees to heat his house. He was so chatty he made me feel at home right away. I took in his stylish slightly punk, silver grey haircut and tie died t-shirt. He needed help stacking wood now that his son was gone to college. And he had plenty of other unfinished projects too. His one and a half acre property was so big he had three different places where I could park. Across the street the resident lama and goat looked at us waiting for a treat of yard trimmings. I was warming to this rural town with its junked cars and casual live and let live combination of liberal mores and DIY rural sensibilities. It was horse country without the pretentiousness. 

I showed him my photo album of my tiny house and disclosed how my composting toilet worked. He did not seem put off by it since I wouldn’t be close enough to impact his garden. He asked $500 in rent with a work trade of 8 to 10 hours a month. I took a day to think about it because of the remote location and brought Catherine up to meet him. He showed us where the Mountain lion lived and where the vultures perched waiting for a carcass and the pile of rocks that was home to snakes. The mountain lion scared Catherine, but she could see that he was a generous and helpful man and I was going to say yes anyway. They still had the same ordinance as other towns that forbid people from living in RVs, but Bob had hosted people living in RVs before and he was willing to do the same for me on the condition that if there were any complaints I would move on. 

He had lived here for 28 years clearing away junk discarded on the land by the previous owner whose son was in construction. There was still construction junk on the land which he had made into sculptures using a bathtub and toilet to fashion into the body of a bi-plane poised to take off into the hills. There was a drag racer made from corrugated tin and discarded truck tires. He also had a couple of rusted tin dinosaurs he was known to arrange in seasonal tableaux. He made metalwork sculptures that adorned his house. This artistic bent endeared me to him. His day job was as a physical therapist at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation where I had once worked myself and met four of my most pivotal friends. I counted the coincidence as a good sign.

I chose the upper pasture for my spot, paid my first and last and began work to level it and prepare it. I brought in a truck load of broken concrete I got free from a homeowner in Fremont who was busy jack hammering up the concrete that covered so much of his yard. I hired my handy friend Tim and it took us three work days and two truck loads of gravel plus more broken concrete to fashion my landing pad firmly enough so the gophers wouldn’t break through it.

Going Solar

During this time the first mandatory blackout by PG & E occurred as fire season got underway. This prompted me to think of launching into solar especially since Bob’s property would require 250 feet of extension cords. The longest cord I could get was 100ft. Even I didn’t like the idea of joining up so many cords. As it turned out there was a man on craigslist selling a complete solar set-up that was just about the right size for a tiny house probably used for a grow house. I had experimented with a cheap system myself, enough to be familiar with the components and his were all very high grade. He was offering a battery pack too. All for $1400. It was a risk to buy used equipment just as it was to buy the tiny house off craigslist, but I was being pulled by the serendipity of it all. Bob approved my idea and showed me the south facing hillside where I could put solar panels right below the parking pad. It couldn’t be more ready for solar.

I had just exactly the right amount of cash on hand to finalize this deal on a bank holiday weekend. I drove all the way up to Richmond to get it. Having measured it out I knew I could just fit the solar panels in my Prius. Mike, the seller told me that two years ago he had used the system very briefly for a grow project involving hydroponics, but then had to move closer to the job market. I had guessed as much. Marijuana having not turned out to be so profitable once complete legalization increased the competition. He showed me how the components worked and how to hook them up. 

He was a serious man also living tiny in a backyard shed finished with sheet rock and furnished as a bedroom. After the transaction was complete I mentioned that my father had been an engineer and had taught me some things. He said his father had been in Vietnam in communications and had taught him a lot about components.

“If you father was in Vietnam he must have spent some time in Thailand,” I said. 

“Yes,” he said, “I am half Thai.” 

“So am I,” I said in surprise. I was so bowled over by this serendipitous revelation I took this whole transaction as a blessing possibly arranged by my father himself from his heavenly perch. Mike smiled for the first time and gave me the traditional greeting of a wai with the words Sawadii Kup. I returned the greeting overcome by my good luck and drove away with my new solar system tickled at how I was going to subvert the power company with all I needed fitting into a Prius.

Several you-tube tutorials later I was confident I could put the system together. I just needed a battery box. I dragged an old metal bathtub up to the site. It had been Bob’s before he remodeled. It was just big enough to hold all four of the golf cart batteries. And the hole where the stopper control was installed was perfect for the extension cords and the cable wires from the panels to enter into my ad hoc battery shed. I put it all together and had power. Such a quantum leap in off-grid living yet so simple.

Moving Day

The day came to move. If my house was any larger I would have thought longer and harder about the actual moving of it. But I just strapped all the books down along with my desk and computer monitor, rented a truck and trusted that Tim who had moved it before would finesse it again. After working out all the details to get it pulled out, pull it out we did and safely towed it all the way to the coast of Half Moon Bay then south to approach my destination via a route less encumbered by low hanging branches and tight turns on narrow winding roads. All went well until we got to Bob’s property and the actual backing in of the house. 

After an agonizing two hour attempt with the truck wheels spinning dry gopher chewed dirt I wanted to run around in circles shouting “Mayday Mayday”. Instead I sent a text to my now down-the-street long time friend Martine asking her to bring me a snack. Her appearance walking up the street offered me emotional support along with sustenance. Bob showed up and started giving directions to no avail. The truck simply wasn’t up to it. So he fired up his 4 wheel drive which he had just to tow his tiny Airstream trailer. Meanwhile Tim pulled the tiny house out into the street again. By this time people were coming home from work at this busy intersection and some heavy equipment needed to get by so it was quite the scene before Bob was able to finally and expertly back the house onto its parking pad. I was so relieved even though inside it looked like an earthquake had hit.

Everything I had left to chance had slid off the counters onto the floor and one framed artwork had disassembled itself and broken the glass. Why hadn’t I been more diligent? I asked myself. Who knows? Sometimes you need things to fall apart completely just to show how near the edge your life has been teetering. The following two days I got the house level and stabilized with all four jacks firmly on the ground and set about organizing my outdoor space. 

The New Homestead

Ironically the house felt smaller in this big space, but once I had cooked a meal in it it was the same house it had always been only it wasn’t at all the same experience. It was so quiet and the light coming through the windows was different, sunnier and vacation like. The energy of this town was completely different from the traffic and freight train noise of my previous packed in neighborhood. It was a retreat place just as Bob said and most remained retreated in their houses. People who were drawn here had a sensibility different from the amenities-driven, competitive population in town. They were really nice Bob assured me. I was already seeing evidence of this. His local friends wanted to meet me the day of the move admiring the cleverness of the tiny house and welcoming me right away. 

My view took my eyes clear over the mountain ridge where I watched the sun set. This town was different too focusing more on the running of the town than any possible revenue. It had its own water from reservoirs up in the hills above. There were also lots of self organized town events involving food. I felt I had found a place that shared my values. 

After my first weekend sleeping in the tiny house in my new mountain home it felt dreamlike driving the beautiful road back into town. And once in the busy-ness of the town I felt different as if my identity had changed. I was now a country person. But there was another feeling too. I felt like I belonged somewhere, to a community and a geography that had embraced me and made me feel like family just for settling there. I felt blessed and lucky and hoped I’d be here awhile.

Year In Review

A huge part of my year was taken up in correspondence while I evaluated my life and my future through the eyes of a potential new partner. I buried this personal story within the context of my tiny house on my tiny house blog. The lessons learned would turn out to be pivotal for my life going forward so I am leaving this signpost to it here back dated to correspond to the timeline. Tiny House Living One Year Later

Tiny House Living: The Rubber Meets The Road

It has been six months since I became a proud home owner of a tiny house. After spending the summer steadily building and outfitting the interior it was time to move in. Time to put to the test my design decisions in this experiment of extreme living.

First Impressions

The first night I spent at my tiny house in the backyard where I had come to live, I noticed a cat sitting on the garden path lit by the security light as though by moonlight. She sat looking at me in my tiny fairy tale size cottage. What a magical sight I thought, a welcoming omen. I opened the door to say hello, but the noise of the door scared her away. Indeed it was so quiet in that garden I climbed into my loft up under the eaves and fell into a deep sleep I hadn't enjoyed in some time.

In the morning standing by my dresser I was startled by the morning light streaming in. With the two windows on each side of the house being only 6 feet apart the contents of my house were sharply lit with daylight. I could see every dust speck. I immediately got out a cloth and started polishing all the chrome—on my Berkey water filter, my electric kettle and my vintage insulated carafe. Once everything was free of fingerprints and water droplets it sparkled as though in a showcase. I was reminded of the work of Joseph Cornell with his arrangements of objects in shadow boxes providing a tiny view into a tiny surreal world. 

Thus the tiny house magnified the experience of living. The confined space, the strangeness of my kitchen layout plus the added dimension of being so tightly connected to other activities further down the road, emptying a waste water tank, pee tank and poop bucket for instance, all created an intense feedback loop that added a pressing dimension to every mundane activity having to do with cooking, eating, washing up and putting things away. It forced me into a state of hyper mindfulness. 

But this was the way I had wanted it. I wanted to be involved in the entire cycle of my water, energy use and waste stream in order to mitigate my impact on the planet. I just didn't know yet what kind of impact that would have on my routine and this unknown made me feel a little uneasy once I moved in. Add to that the stress of being in a new place, working out new routes to all my clients and figuring out what to feed myself now that I was single. This was why moving was stressful I reminded myself. My body reacted by being hungry all the time and I wished my outdoor freezer was full of frozen dinners.

Adjustments To Life In The Tiny

I had been congratulating myself for having finessed my move into the tiny house moving two or three boxes at a time while carrying on with my full schedule of clients. It did take longer, but I convinced myself it would be less painful that way, like pulling the bandaid off a little bit at a time. I wrote a post on downsizing and getting a taste of my own medicine as an organizer as I got rid of things while trying to squeeze as much of my old life as I could into the tiny house.

I had done numerous moves unpacking clients with crews of organizers. But those houses were so much alike there was hardly any difference between one kitchen and another. The challenge of my tiny house was that it was unlike anywhere I or anyone I knew had ever lived before. Nothing could be taken for granted to function normally from the fridge to the sink to the toilet. I had purposefully deconstructed and reorganized basic systems and I had no experience using such systems on a daily basis.

Would the cooler keep my food cold enough? What would it be like to boil water for all my washing up?  Would I be able to cook breakfast successfully given my regime of fried eggs, sausages and refried beans? How long would my butane cartridge hold out in my stove? Where could I buy more? What would I use for heat? I had joked that the house was so tiny it could be heated with a candle and besides I was menopausal, why would I need heat at all this being California in an era of global warming? And then it got cold, colder than it had gotten in some years.

Winter is a hard month to move into a tiny house. The days are so short there is little time to tend to things outdoors. I came home to a dark house with an unlit entrance gate to open. Then it rained and rain seeped into my outdoor freezer. I had the wrong footwear for the muddy garden I was to tend. The mud tracked into my house. My bicycle no longer had a garage to park in so I had covered it, but my karate uniform which was strapped to the carrier in a sports bag felt slightly damp when I put it on at class. 

I did order a propane heater and when I saw a space heater at a garage sale I picked it up. But the house would not stay warm on its own. What was wrong with it? It had felt so insulated during the hot summer months, staying so cool inside. 

A few days later while wiping the floor I felt a draft and tracked it down to a half inch gap under the door. No wonder the house stayed cool. It was pulling cold air across it constantly. It took two trips to the hardware store to find the right weatherstripping. Then I didn't have any nails on hand to install the rubber flange I got for I no longer had a garage. All my hardware was now at my stepmother's house two miles away. In the summer these were easy problems to solve, but the winter gave everything an edge of desperation. 

My car was so full of stuff thrown in it for lack of storage I put my lunch in one day and I couldn't find it come lunch time. These scenarios were both ridiculous and maddening for an organizer.

I spent my evenings urgently researching. What was the proper temperature for food safety? I bought a freezer thermometer which compounded my fears because the temperature in the cooler was in the red zone hovering near 50°. I did not fancy food poisoning on top of everything else. I researched every item I kept in the cooler from the eggs to the mayonnaise. Mayonnaise I was relieved to learn could be kept at room temperature because it was so acidic. And eggs in Europe were kept at room temperature because chickens there were vaccinated for salmonella unlike those in the states. Hmmm. 

Cooking breakfast was at least doable. I loved my stove in a drawer. And I installed a hook to hang my iron skillet right next to it. And another hook to hang the pot scrubber I used to clean it. It was the washing up I had to reinvent. What kind of dish drainer could I fit and where? I prowled the aisles of Target and Bed Bath & Beyond looking for solutions to new problems I seemed to face daily. Why hadn't I thought of pot holders for instance or a doormat? 

When the temperature dropped I braved firing up the propane heater, Mr. Heater (Little Buddy model). Little Buddy heated things up quickly and the 4" disk of burning wires felt like an open fire. I cracked a window so I wouldn't run out of oxygen until I realized that enough fresh air was entering through the drain in the shower pan. I also put together one of those flower pot heaters so widely demonstrated on youtube. Once I got all the right size flower pots bolted together and some votive candle holders to hold the four tea lights safely it worked beautifully offering a warm presence by my feet that didn't overheat like the propane heater. I used my electric space heater in the morning up in the loft. I also had a hot water bottle (courtesy of my Canadian girlfriend) to warm up the bed at night. A sleeping bag I was needing to store became my winter quilt.

Clients gave me all sorts of useful items and asked me what else I needed. Thus I was supplied with pyrex dishes sized for a toaster oven, silverware, pots, pot holders, tiny utensils from a VW van equipped to live in and containers to put it all in. And a weather thermometer. Very handy so I could watch how cold it was getting. 48° this morning. 

What Had I Done To Myself? 

Some things I thought I'd do a certain way had to be completely revised. My vision of dish washing Thai farmer style required room to spread out three dish pans of water—two soapy and one clean plus room to spread dishes out to dry; all this usually done outside. I knew I wouldn't be able to replicate the three dishpans; I had two dish pans that fit perfectly into my sink with their rims resting on the edges of the sink. I thought I would just switch them out, but moving full dish pans of dirty water got old pretty quickly. And dishes seemed to get greasier in the process.

It brought to mind my first Cat In The Hat Book. The one about the pink stain the Cat In The Hat was "helping" to clean up, but the pink stuff just moved from one thing to another until it became completely overwhelming got all over the house then shot outside and covered the entire landscape. That's what greasy dishwater reminded me of. Plus the waster water tank filling up prompted me to rethink even filling a dishpan.

I took a closer look at the drain in my shower pan, put a large mouthed funnel into it and poured any greasy water (from washing a pan for instance) directly into it (to the waste water tank below). I scraped my dishes clean into my compost bucket. Then soaped it up without laying it down anywhere. From my insulated carafe I poured clean hot water over the dish to rinse it into my dishpan. Now I had soapy mostly clean water in the dish pan where I could throw in my silver ware to wash. This was in reverse order to how my English grandmother had taught me when I was 8, but it worked. 

I found a minimalist dish drain at Bed Bath & Beyond that came strapped to a drying mat and laid it on top of my toaster oven. 

That was another thing about my kitchen. It came in layers. To open my cooler I had to bend over, hold that position and pull away the couch bench that covered the cooler. Then roll the couch bench back over it or I wouldn't have room to move. 

I learned to remember all the items I would need from the cooler for each meal though I'm still forgetting at least one thing. For the evening meal the dishes had to be put away or I wouldn't be able to use my toaster oven. Was there anywhere to put things down that wouldn't be used so soon? 

I discovered where. On my sewing table under the stairs. And on one bench. Plus my chair in a pinch.

The floor being cold I put down a rug, but had to shunt it out of the way to get to the cooler. Then put it back again. I did this with my feet. It got to be a little dance. Then to use the sink I had to step into the shower pan which was often wet I realized so I took to standing on the walls of the shower pan and leaning awkwardly towards the sink. What had I done to myself? I wondered. 

Getting Ship Shape

I told myself I was living on a boat. It sounded more romantic. My family had owned a sailboat in my childhood and I had marveled at the cleverness of the living space in the cabin with its dining room table transforming into a bunk. People had lived in their boats in that harbor and I read books about sailing solo across the Pacific. Yes the narrowness of my tiny house did resemble a boat being smaller than most tiny houses. 

Other tiny house dwellers strived for normalcy with kitchens equipped with sinks and refrigerators. Even washers and dryers. But those tiny houses were at least twice as big as mine and a little wider. I wanted to be low profile. This necessity cut into any normalcy. I felt like I was on an expedition climbing a mountain from a base camp. I'd read lots of those books as a kid too. 

This extreme living forced me to put things away all the time. The discipline of the tiny house was severe that way. Both waste water tank and pee tank only took a week to fill I would soon discover. That first week filled me with trepidation. But what really drove me to distraction was the unfinished curtains. The windows were small enough that I could buy just one panel and cut them into two for each of the windows facing the street. I pinned them to the wall and that took care of the street light that kept waking me up and the neighbors looking in as they got in their cars in their driveway five feet from my house. I just couldn't open the curtains to let any light in because I didn't have a curtain rod to slide them on. And I couldn't face going to any store on Thanksgiving weekend with all the doorbuster crowds. I longed for some sense of normalcy. I needed a break from all this hyper mindfulness living. 

I texted Catherine to ask if I could come over because my house was exhausting me. She was happy to have me as she was missing me. She fed me turkey dinner leftovers and I built a roaring fire. What a luxury of heat. We put our feet up and watched a movie. I did not have a TV installed in my tiny house. I suspected I wouldn't have time to watch it. (I had installed a hammock hoping I'd actually have time to lie around in it.) I stayed two days at Catherine's in my old room. Then having restored some sense of normalcy I began to miss my things and decided to go home and face the music. I would boldly empty the waste water tank.

I had bought an 11 gallon waste tank because I knew how heavy a 5 gallon bucket was and even with wheels this tank would likely be difficult to maneuver. It was my aim to empty my pee tank into it to dilute the pee so as not to harm any plants I was feeding with the nitrogen in the urine. I would then trundle the 11 gallons around to the trees and bushes that surrounded my house to water them via the handy outlet on the tank where a hose could be installed. Too bad the garden was already so well watered with all the rain. At least the plants would be fertilized. 

The tank was heavy, but relatively easy to drag around even over the tall clumps of grass. A week was a short leash, but at least in the dry months a weekly watering of the garden would be welcome. I just kept reminding myself that urine was sterile as I handled these tanks. The poop bucket gave me a month before I had to haul it out to empty into my rotating composting bin. An easier task. I also added the dog poop of the resident German Shepherd as it was part of my trade to pick it up thus closing the loop for both of us.

Gradually I adapted to the regime of the tiny house and it to me. I went to the Marine store and bought myself a deck tile to put in the shower pan. This kept my feet dry and the ergonomics of being able to stand where I was supposed to stand to use the sink was a huge improvement. I made a dumb waiter for the loft with a simple pulley attached to the ceiling so I could get my laundry crate down. I did laundry and washed my hair at Catherine's and we got in some episodes of "The Crown". 

I invited some colleagues over to see my tiny house. "What do you miss most ?" one asked. "Space," I said. A place to put down random things. Otherwise I had pretty much everything I needed. I could also multi task like nobody's business. Check e-mail while frying eggs, put my contacts in without having to walk to another room. I would probably never burn a meal again because there was no other room to be gone in. And after a couple of weeks of the hyper mindfulness my concentration and my memory seemed to improve.

And there was still room for the unexpected.

Room For The Unexpected

The helpful client of the VW bus utensils, off loaded a vintage model of an animal cell that had been at NASA (in the department that studied mutations). The cell model needed a home so when she retired from her job as a lab technician there she took it with her. I admired it every time I saw it in the condo she shared with her wife. One day she decided it could go. It was made of clear fiberglass upon which were attached all the parts of the cell painted in blues and green. It was so cool I told her I wish I had a bigger house to keep it in. 

The more I looked at it the more I wanted it so I took it home to admire. I set it on the couch bench where the blue green base blended in perfectly with the blue green of my couch. As I dusted all the cell parts remembering my high school biology I realized the base was hollow all the way into the cell body. Perhaps I could get a light into it I thought. No bulb would fit so I retrieved a string of Christmas lights from storage, stuffed the lights into the body of the cell, plugged it in and there I had a giant Christmas ornament. What a beauty. 

At nightfall my lit up cell was so beautiful and full of little lights it was all the holiday decoration I needed. It would be my pagan tiny house Christmas tree I decided.

How appropriate I thought. For some years now when asked what was my religion, I would put down that I believed in the divinity of cell division for that was as distilled as I could sum up my awe at life forcing itself into being with every seed and unfurling leaf. No matter what the conditions or circumstance, these intrepid cells of living beings of all forms still insisted on being born and carrying on. And so would I. And would we all whatever might befall us.

Wishing you all a joyful holiday and a proactive new year.