When searching for the origin of my love of tiny houses, I could start here. with the shed.
The shed in Wyoming was painted brick red over gray wood that bowed at the edges of the planks like scalloping on a dress. Inside a bed sank between a curlicue iron headboard and footboard. In the front left corner sat a tiny black woodstove big enough to boil coffee on one cup at a time. In the right front was bookcase holding yellowing copies of nearly every Little House on Prairie novel. We were right at home.
Raji and I had been best friends since seventh grade and shared the dream of living on our own as children. At twenty and twenty-one we could live on our own and thought we weren’t children anymore, we had already had enough of the adult world to want to go back. The shed suited us. We were there, a Spanish Mustang horse farm in Wyoming, to trace the origin of a pony named Six Raji was filming a documentary about back in Santa Fe.
You have to whisper a Mustang. If you break them by force, you won’t earn their devotion or loyalty, you will kill it. Kill it or drive it away. The whole reason the population of Spanish Mustangs exist in the American West is that they escaped their captors who boated them over here and survived on their own in the wild plains.
Sometimes to whisper is to challenge. How will you earn their respect if you don’t assert your presence? After all, you can’t ride a wild horse without its permission.
The shed held us in place and purpose. To make the movie. To know the horses. To learn from the eighty year old ranchers and trainers who are the best in their field. Its eves gave just enough space to dream and think and rest after a long day filming and feeding the hundred-some horses, cattle, and a single sheep, Mrs. Norris, who thought herself a cow. We went into the main house to use the bathroom and have meals—beef stew and hot drop biscuits with honey. A meal I never tired of. That it was homemade goes without saying; this is the West.
It was a tiny house. It got screaming hot when the stove was lit. We were somewhere between childhood and adulthood and so was it. The shed was a vehicle for a life about horses, a means, not an end. And I feel as though I’ve been looking for that simplicity ever since.