Free The Big Tiny: A Built-It-Myself Memoir by Dee Williams Page B

and twisted around, and that’s when I knew I was in trouble. I came back at the building, kneesfirst, scraped along the barn wall, and dropped eight feet into the barnyard manure, where I lay conscious but unmoving, trying to assess the damage to my legs, my ninja pride, and the damaged extension cord (which my dad would later shake his head over and spank me for ruining). Meanwhile, my brothers thought this was the funniest thing they’d ever seen: “Just like a cartoon!” they cried. “Do it again!”
    Doug became a Methodist minister, a vocation that complemented his ability to witness people do dumb shit and then help them pick up the pieces. He had recently flown to Portland to be with me after my defibrillator was implanted. I woke up in the cardiac care unit to find him sleeping next to me; he’d stayed up all night listening to the heart monitor, and had finally dozed off in a nearby chair. When he woke up, he found his “ass crack on backward,” so he’d crawled up on the bed beside me, lying on his back. He had dangled his legs off the bed to avoid accidentally bumping my bubble-packed chest and the sea of associated tubes and wires, and then crossed his arm over his torso so he could tuck his right hand into his left pants pocket, leaving him looking like a leaf of wilted lettuce. He looked “here but gone,” which was just how I felt.
    Everyone needs a good accomplice, and in some weird way, I knew finding the Tiny House Man in Iowa City was a good thing—like divinity or fate was working in our favor—simply by the fact that Jay lived in the same town as my brother Doug.
    Jay’s house was in a residential neighborhood, tuckedbehind a larger normal house, and as we walked to the backyard, we found him standing on his porch, waiting for us, looking incredibly large given the small scale of his abode. I found myself approaching him with a mixture of complete excitement and hesitating fear . . . like a four-year-old seeing Santa at the mall. I was too nervous to say anything funny or weird, and instead smiled and shook his outreached hand and mumbled, “I have a photo of you and your house stuck to my refrigerator,” which instantly made me feel like a miniature copy of that article was stuck in my teeth.
    “Doesn’t everyone?” he said, putting his hands on his hips in a Superman pose and looking off in the distance like a statue. Apparently, his sense of humor was on par with mine; I immediately liked him.
    Before we went inside, while Doug and Jay talked on the porch, I walked around the house, gunning my hand along the siding and patting the window sashes. I loved Jay’s little house and found myself wanting to hug it, to lean into it and smell it or get my picture taken next to it like I was standing with the president. Inside, Jay gave us a short tour (a little joke at the time) and then we sat down around a tiny table with our knees touching. It felt like the sort of thing you’d do at a noisy café, where you’d naturally scoot in to hear each other and accidentally touch toes or kick each other when you crossed your legs. Jay pulled out a wad of papers and photographs, spreading them out on the small table between us, and then showed usfloor plans and elevations, construction details, and sketches of some of the other houses he had designed. He and Doug chitchatted about how the house was connected to the trailer and how the walls were reinforced, and all the while I was mostly quiet. I glanced around at the knotty pine walls, the kitchen setup with its shiny galley sink and stainless steel countertop, and the way the cabinets were joined together. I casually cocked my head, trying not to seem overly nosy as I read the titles of books stacked on the shelves—books about cabins, barns, tree houses, yurts, converted vans, an “Earthship,” old hippie wagons, shepherds’ wagons, chuck wagons, hay wagons, boats, and old Airstreams. His bookshelves looked like an expanded version of