Living Small

Yesterday we traveled to Lund, Sweden, to spend time with a friend from Arne's childhood, Simon, and his family. They live in a neighborhood on the edge of Lund that was built in the 1970s, but it might as well have been erected in the Middle Ages. The streets are so narrow that you can practically touch the hedge on each side, and the houses are tucked in close together. Although it's possible to drive through in your car, and folks do if they need to drop off groceries or make quick pick-ups, the cars are parked in a row of garages on the edge of the neighborhood. The houses themselves are not huge--that is most seem to be about 1500 square feet.

On the surface, this just doesn't sound appealing, but the truth is, the neighborhood is charming, welcoming, and livable. First, with almost no through-traffic, it is quiet and safe. Second, the houses are arranged so that front doors are not opposite one another and so that sides with fewer windows are closest to neighbors. Back gardens are enclosed by hedges and fences. In short, even though folks are living in close quarters, there is a sense of complete privacy. And every few houses are arranged around a small park. Biking/hiking trails lead out of the neighborhood in several directions.

What a contrast this neighborhood is to the one we live in in Morris, built about a decade earlier. Parkview Heights (what pretension!) consists of ten houses, each one a good 3000 square feet or more sitting on about 1 1/2 to 2 acres each. The street is wide enough that a semi can park on it and neighbors can still get by in their SUVs. Houses are built well back from the street, feature long, wide driveways, and two car garages. You know the sort of place I mean. We all have the accoutrements of living large: sheds and patios and rider mowers, weed whackers, leaf blowers, snow blowers, boats, snowmobiles, trailers, RVs.

In Lund, developers on the same size property as Parkview Heights could accomodate four times as many houses and two small parks and still have room for everyone to have one car in a garage. And on weekends, instead of spending all of Saturday morning mowing our par-three yards, we could talk to our children or grandchildren.

But in Morris, as in all of the United States, the Middle Ages are not memory but curiosity. Living large on the land is our birthright, what sets us apart from our ancestors who came over from the small countries. Here in Denmark you can walk from one village to the next in half an hour. From Morris, if you walked half an hour from the city limits you'd be in a corn field and you may not even be able to see the farther limit of the field. If you wanted to get to the next village you'd walk the better part of the morning. No, in Morris, if you go anywhere, you drive. And any public building put up in the last twenty years begins with a parking lot. One topic in the community or on campus that is guaranteed to raise the temperature is the question of parking. Remodel the old ugly parking area downtown, but for god's sake, don't lose any parking space!

So it's interesting to think about what's going to happen at home in the next few years given that gas prices are not going back down. We might have to dust off our history books and take a lesson from the Middle Ages, when people lived small, quiet lives with few possessions and their two feet to get them around.