About Urban Simplicity

I've read a number of books lately that promise to teach me how to live my life more simply, with a large or small family. While I appreciate many of the tips included in these books, one theme seems to run through them all: If you want to live simply with a family, you must do it in suburbia with a large house and a yard and a large vehicle to manage it all.

I find this premise rather frustrating, as we live in a large urban area, and have chosen to raise our family in a 1650 square foot home with exactly two full size closets, neither of which are in bedrooms. Living in an older home as a lot of quirks. For example, the master bedroom has a small half closet (read: 13" deep), and there is a small half closet on the landing outside the master bedroom, neither of which are particularly useful for clothing storage, but we make it work because we have to. In this house, we have to be creative with storage, as well as with how we choose to raise our family in this house. I've gotten lots of good ideas for storage in small spaces over the years, and hope to share a few with you as time goes by.

The other part of the equation is that we've chosen to drive our (small) car as little as possible, and are therefore public transit- and bike-dependent, which produces its own interesting reality. The way one shops for groceries, or gets to doctor's appointments or whatever other life errands you can think of must be accomplished in a particular way for this to work. I'm not saying we never drive in the city, but we do try to limit our driving.

I was lamenting the fact that there seems to be a dearth of information on how to raise a family (of any size) in the city in the housing that is peculiar to urban life, particularly on the East Coast. An acquaintance said that I should write such a book in 15 years (and that she would be interested to read it). I mulled that for a while, and then thought, why not blog about it now? The danger with waiting 15 years is that I will have forgotten what it is like to live in a vertical house with very small children, and many things can change in 15 years. I realize that tackling a topic like this is a little like shoveling during a snow storm, but sometimes that is useful in its way.

So this is my start. I don't claim to be the final authority on parenting, row homes, homemaking, urban life, spiritual life, or any of the topics that might grace this blog in the future, but I would like to at least share what I think about these things, and what has worked for us (and what hasn't). I welcome dialogue in the comments section, but please let's keep it civil. I also recognize that my own thinking about some of these things is still evolving, so don't take anything I say as set in stone. I may write a post that completely reverses a former position. Such is the nature of a blog.

So bear with me, and perhaps we can learn some things from each other along the way.