On Building Big

You know, this article really hit me. I have a 1300 square foot home that often seems huge to me (and difficult to clean) and I sometimes wish we had a smaller home. I mean, all of us generally use the one master bath. We only use 2 of the three bedrooms. And yet, I know my home is considered "modest." A friend refused to consider any home less than 1500 square feet for her family. 1500 square feet? That's 200 more square feet to clean and to worry about. I personally like small houses with big yards but that ideal seems to be going as builders realize they charge "per square foot" and that's for the home, not the lot. You can read this poignant article here.

I was driving to Boston and saw this house set above the others, all pomp and puffery, just a blink away from a city where the working poor live in flats, and it struck me -- as it hasn't in a long, long time, because I am inured, because I see what I want to see -- that we are going in the wrong direction in this country; that the gap between the rich and the poor is a great divide and it is not pretty, no matter what your political beliefs.