I’ve been watching some of the shows about the Tiny House movement lately and really trying to picture myself in a tiny house.  Now, you should know that I live in an apartment that I built in my parent’s basement that is about 1000 square feet.  (To be fair, I do “share” some of their storage space in the house).  But I look around my space and think there are things I could get rid of, and things I just couldn’t.  The items on the couldn’t list are usually books or memories.  

I understand the advantages of a tiny house living with regard to price and footprint; but I watch people making decisions about giving up things and I wonder if, at some point, they will be sorry for their choices.  Sure you can take photographs of keepsakes you let go, but there is something about the feel of something.  

Let me give you an example.  My mother made her own wedding dress.  I will confess her great sin here.     

She had seen a dress she wanted in a magazine in the library , tore the picture out, and found a series of patterns to make it.  We were looking through her cedar chest last year and found the leftover material from her dress, a beautiful white-on-white brocade.  I had, of course, seen pictures of the dress; and the dress does still hang in her closet.  But there was something about the leftover scraps of fabric there were a testament to the fact that she had made her own dress that I just loved.  The dress had yellowed through the years, but somehow these pieces were still white.  

So, would those scraps have fit in a tiny house?  Definitely not.  But was the cedar chest the proper final home for them? Probably not.  There is a option in between — give the memory the honor it deserves.  To do that, I am making a memory box for my mother to hold pieces of her relationship to my father, and the box is covered in these scraps.  More on this project in the next post.