Why Why Why?

The hardest part about moving has been explaining to people that I am perfectly aware I am moving my little toddler-children into a two-bedroom house with no yard and smack dab in the jumbled-up zoning-free center of the fourth largest city in the U.S.

Yes, two bedrooms. By modern housing standards, they are small; the master bedroom is 14'x17' and the second bedroom is about 10'x12'. If we really need to find more space we could always convert the garage, but that's not likely. What small bedrooms mean is that we can't buy large furniture or hoard a decade's worth of clothing in our closets. When we tell each other good night we won't have to yell from one wing of the house to the other. Isn't all that a good thing? Anyway, is a master suite, children's suite, and gameroom/loft the size of Belgium actually necessary? In fact, should we even pretend that the spacious McMansion of American dreams is a mainstream expectation when a significant fraction of this city's population will go to bed hungry tonight, with siblings, parents, and grandparents crammed into a dark one- or two-bedroom apartment? And are Carmen and David better off if they grow up assuming that they must have those American essentials--bedroom, television, bathroom--of their very own when one of the most common complaints of the 21st-century modern society is the family that has grown distant despite living under the same roof?

The other benefits of the neighborhood outweigh the fact that we'll have to share bathrooms and not all have bedrooms to entertain friends. (Instead, there's the living room with 18' of floor-to-ceiling windows, a breezy balcony, or funky private patio screaming for strings of Christmas lights and a DJ.) We'll be able to walk places, like school, the library, the grocery store. We'll have a diversity of friends and learning resources at our fingertips.

And parks. Lots of parks. When they are through worrying about the bedrooms, people worry about the fact that I have no yard at the new place. But I can't hide my delight. A 1/4 acre plot of St. Augustine grass is one of the most boring, understimulating, all-around awful constructions of the 20th century. "But where," people ask, "will the babies play?" Let me put it in writing that the neighborhood kids on Carvel, where we are moving from, rarely play in their backyards. Instead, they play on the street, making my car the end zone. Or they beg their parents to take them to the park, where they don't have to worry about kicking balls over fences, or breaking windows with softballs that weren't, after all, so soft. So what's the big deal about all that fenced-in grass, anyway? So when C&D need to climb and holler like monkeys, or run and dance like colts, we can walk to a park and meet some new monkey-friends, or drive out to the country where we can run past the pastures and sink our hands in the loose dirt the chickens scratched for us.

Underneath these arguments is a deeper sense of reasoning that I don't discuss much because some things are just too hard to talk about in polite company. But it's this: We're really doing an experiement, I guess, trying to live city-style in a so-called city that's really one big suburb. Call, it, maybe, "city lite." By walking more and driving less, relying on public spaces like parks rather than our own private ones, and living closer to several sources for local, organic, and/or sustainably-grown food, we'll be better able to live more consciously, and show C&D that there is a better way than living in Houston's newest housing development, shopping according to the advertisements at the Super-Duper MegaMart and spending a significant part of their lifespan on the freeway while their buttocks mold to the seat of the minivan. The new place will rely 100% on wind power for a source of energy, and some minor modifications should easily make the new house more energy-efficient. We hope that C&D will learn that by buying an existing house with no yard, we are preserving, someplace, 1/4 acre of parkland or pasture or Big Thicket forest or rich loamy cropland above a Brazos river bottom. We hope that when C&D look back at growing up in the funky grey house they'll proudly consider themselves a kind of urban pioneer, settling in the city to avoid the exurban landscape of concrete and TruGreen Chemlawns, and doing our part in the day-to-day to ultimately create more of what we really want: cleaner air, greener spaces, wilder places.