The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

On some of my more uppity days, I look down the road and my nose at my neighbors’ houses, most of them running 3000 square feet with garages the size of an airplane hangar.  And I think:  how much stuff do you need that it takes 5 bedrooms, his and her walk-in closets, 3 and a half baths, plus a 3 car garage that parks a 40 foot travel trailer big as a mobile home?  All this for a family whose kids have grown and left the South End.  And while I’m up on my High Horse, I start wondering why is America so hooked on material acquisition and always wants more and needs, apparently the new and improved version of everything from their riding lawnmower to their garbage disposal with the 50 tooth slicer-dicer and odor control setting.   I can get pretty damn smug.  I can rant and I can rave.  I will even vent about living in my dilapidated 800 square foot shack, poor as a church rat, and finally end up babbling about those humble beginnings, living modestly, close to the Land.

This past couple of weeks I went into spring cleaning mode — even though it’s August now.  Started out back in the woodshop.  Tools got dragged out and junked or donated, the place got cleaned and rearranged, a lot got burned.  I moved to my bike shed, hauled out everything non-bike, paneled the interior with cedar and now I had all my boat gear in the lawn.  So I remodeled my lawnmower shed, tossed decades old tools and dead chainsaws and mulching blades and rusty junk, moved a 1930’s wringer washer out and put it in the garden shed, then went at the garden shed.

Eventually I made it to the boatshed, then out to the kayak shelter and finally into the old shack itself, now a glass studio, the living testament to frugal living, a shrine to my oh so ascetic lifestyle.  Course now it’s bigger by double, a second house really, bedroom, bath, all the comforts of home even though we have one up top we built 20 years ago.  If you add them all up — and I did— my neighbors look like the folks who downsized, who cut their carbon footprints and who probably should apply for food stamps any day.

Our 16 buildings, yeah, I said 16, from the sauna to the boathouse, the bike shed to the wellhouse, the garden shed to the studio, woodshop to outhouse, rootcellar to garden shed, woodsheds to kayak shelter, well …. I guess they seem maybe a bit extravagant, if not deliriously deranged.  Maybe not a McMansion, just a McNuthouse.  I know this:  I’m gonna stop pointing accusatory fingers at the neighbors and their piddly little domiciles.  At least until I find out they’re depressing the property values here on the politically correct South End.

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