Essay: When is Bigger Big Enough?

By Lois Shea on Thursday, July 3, 2003.

listen:

I live on the ghost of a hill farm.

The farm once stretched over a hundred acres.
There were apple trees on the western slopes; cows wandered down the east hill to pasture.
Now the orchard is shaded by white pine; maples have grown up in the cattle road.
A beaver pond has drowned the mowing field.
If you didn’t know the way of New Hampshire woods, you might not believe the pasture ever existed.

Marion Moulton lived on this farm in the 1930s.
Her husband Bernard was the hired hand. His job paid next to nothing – but it came with a place for his young family to live: a two-room cabin on a rough stone foundation.
The cabin had a kitchen, and a bedroom.
That was it.
There was a privy outside.
I happened to meet a cousin of Marion’s recently. She told me that when she came to visit she slept under the kitchen table. There was nowhere else to put her. The place was that small.
In the 1930s, this cabin was probably not a pleasant place to live. Even by Depression-era standards, it wasn’t much.
It almost certainly had no insulation. When the January wind whipped over the hill and rattled the windows, the cold could probably about make you cry.

I live in that cabin.
But it’s not a cabin now.
In that way of New England houses, it has been added to and reconfigured, some parts shored up and other parts torn down. It has been wired, and insulated, and even has fairly reliable indoor plumbing.
If you know the history – and you look real hard – you can still see the hired hand’s cabin at the core of the house.
But the house is five times the size it was then. It has eight rooms. It has two bathrooms.
And -- amazingly enough -- by today’s standards it’s not a big house.

It has no dining room, no guest room, no laundry room, no garage.
The kitchen is exactly the same size it was in 1930 -- no counter or cupboard space.
Compared to the new houses going up all over New Hampshire, this one is grossly inadequate.
Compared to what it was then, it’s a mansion on the hill.
Still, I catch myself now and again, having kitchen envy.
I’ll be standing in some bright, Italian-tiled kitchen with glass-fronted cupboards. And thinking, unhappily, about my own cramped kitchen with the painted plywood cabinets and disintegrating linoleum floor.

Then I think about this house in the 1930s.
And laugh.

A friend who sells real estate tells me she sold a house near Keene recently -- that had ten bathrooms.
Who wants to own ten toilets?
At Dunkin Donuts, you can get a 64-ounce cup of iced coffee. That’s a half gallon. It comes with one straw.
Drink that, and you may just need the ten bathrooms.
Ten baths may not be standard. But three are. And four are even better.
Remember when having a half-bath in the cellar – a toilet and sink and a bare bulb -- was a luxury?
Our expectations seem to increase with every generation.

There got to be some point, though, where “bigger” becomes big enough. Where “better” becomes good enough. Doesn’t there?

This hired hand’s house could be even bigger. “We really need a dining room,” I complained, as I set the kitchen table last Thanksgiving.
It would be nice to have a deck, too. And a guest room big enough to hold an actual bed.

Nearly every day, though, I find myself standing in one of Marion’s two rooms, thinking about her. I think of her heating her baby’s bath water on the kitchen stove. I think of her heading outside to the privy in January. I think about guests sleeping under her kitchen table.

And I think about need.

And building that dining room seems kind of silly.