A Small Obsession

Jack, my almost 7 year old, has a new obsession. On the way to my dad’s last week, we passed a tiny old dilapidated wood shack along the side of the creek bank. A gentle blow and slight push would have knocked it over. John jokingly told the boys, “That’s where you can live when you grow up.” Jack got immediately…excited.

Ever since then, he has been obsessed with the size of his future house. And not just his future house, but his current bedroom. Over the weekend, I talked him into going to look at a couple of open houses with me (my own incurable obsession). In the first house, we walked into the small mud/laundry room. I told him, “This could be your room.”

“Oh, could it be, please?” he asked me, completely serious.

“No,” I said. “This is the laundry room.”

“Well, we’d need to move that. This is a tiny room and I want it. My room right now is too big.” Know any kids that think their room is too big? I didn’t think I did either.

The next house we went to (but we didn’t get to go into because, as often is the case with children, a nature call interrupted us) had a small, fake guard shack at the entrance to the neighborhood to try to make it seem like it was worth the price they were asking for it. When we were leaving the neighborhood, Jack said, “I would totally live there.” I thought he meant the big, beautiful house on the corner. He meant the fake guard shack.

He said, “I’d have a bed and a table and I’d sit on my bed to eat.”

I said, “Where would you put the refrigerator to keep your food?”

He said, “I’d keep it somewhere else and just bring in what I needed when I needed it.” The owners of Sam's Club and Costco collectively shuttered, although they didn't know why.

I said, “Where would you put the television?”

He was quiet for a minute. “Yeah, I guess I’d need a t.v.” And then he thought about it. “No I wouldn’t. I’d just spend all of my time outside exploring. And then at night I’d go home and go to sleep.”

Yeah, right. This from a kid who gets tired after being outside for more than an hour. So I started asking him where he’d put his clothes and his toys and his Nintendo and his Playstation, etc. He answered with, “Somewhere else,” or, "I just need a little bit," or, “I don’t need it at all.”

That got me thinking. Here I am, looking at bigger houses dreaming of what I could do with more space (fill it with more clutter, perhaps). And here’s my almost 7 year old, already so wise and dreaming of downsizing and ridding his life of the clutter. Wouldn’t life be so simple in a one room shack? A bed, a table, spending your days exploring outside, and sleeping when you get tired. It makes me want to chuck it all and head for the hills, living with my family Little House on the Prairie style. But I won’t, because as much as Jack longs for that one room shack, he longs for his Nintendo and toys more. And I still long for more space to put it all in.