WARNING: If you’re feeling the least bit unpatriotic, this blog post is not for you.
The good people of St. Michaels, Maryland have decided that Independence Day is their holiday. And why not? It’s “The Town That Fooled the British,” after all: in 1813 its citizens foiled a British attack by hanging lanterns high in the trees and on ships’ masts, thereby causing the Redcoats‘ cannons to overshoot the town. Pretty clever, really (if it’s true).
In other words, the town has history – and charm – to spare.
So every July 4th, St. Michaels hosts a celebration that involves wrapping anything standing still in red, white, and blue crepe paper. There’s a children’s parade, in which kids and dogs march proudly around the block in their festooned bikes, trikes, wagons, and scooters. The American Flag is hoisted to the top of a flagpole and the Pledge of Allegiance solemnly recited. There’s face painting, balloons, kids’ games, a fife & drum corps, hot dogs and ice cream, and – my husband’s favorite – a word-for-word reading of the Declaration of Independence.
Ok, fine. You get it. So what’s my point?
The point is that all of this takes place in front of a tiny house museum on St. Mary’s Square.
And this house, Sewell House, the building on the right in the picture above, is a gentle reminder that we Americans – inventors of the McMansion; drivers of the largest, land-ravaging, child-devouring cars on earth; believers in our strength and power above every other nation’s – were once capable of living in much smaller spaces. And happily so.
The house was built around 1865 by a waterman named Jeremiah Sewell for himself “and his family of six.” (All of this info. is lifted from the St. Michaels Museum brochure, by the way.)
“Family of six.” I’m not sure if this means Jeremiah and his better half plus four children, or whether there are 5 kids or 6…doesn’t really matter. What matters is that this family lived in four rooms.
The living room is the first you enter (these pictures make the spaces seem larger than they are):
(I’m pretty certain that the open doorway below didn’t exist – or it led to the outside – when the Sewells lived here.)
This is a middle-class family, by the way. Being a St. Michaels waterman (fisherman) was – still is – a perfectly fine thing to be.
Here’s the cozy kitchen-slash-dining room – an “eat-in kitchen,” if you will:
The stairs from the living room lead to the main bedroom:
And beyond it is a much smaller bedroom:
A middle-class family of six, living comfortably in four rooms. Extreme by today’s standards, but it’s all relative, isn’t it? New Yorkers manage to live comfortably – luxuriously, even – in much smaller spaces than their brothers and sisters in the suburbs. Yet when we grow dissatisfied with our homes, our first impulse usually is to expand.
Don’t get me wrong: you couldn’t pay me enough to put my family of four in a house this size.
But you have to admit that there’s a case to be made for making a home perfect before making it bigger.