Harvest Day. Home as a Hobby and Lessons Learned from Small Space Living

Here on the northern tip of the California coast Autumn is singing its song. An onshore breeze is blowing, damp and cool, and the late September daylight shifts, flirting with me. I’m sitting outside writing in my journal with my left arm downright hot in the sun, while my right arm in the shade grows goose bumps. Cormorants are flying to the lagoon and then back again to the ocean. It’s my kind of weather with the beauty of earth, sea and air. 
 
Today I am at home resting. September is tomato season up on the mountain, and we have been in full swing. Yesterday, at my daughter’s home in the mountains with her family (a thirty-minute drive from here) we picked, chopped and roasted seventy pounds of home-grown garden tomatoes. While they simmered for hours in our make-shift kitchen in the garage, I wandered hills and valleys with the grandkids, with our dogs trailing behind or leading the way. Even down by the barn we could smell that sauce, the sweet spicy scent drawing us in. When it was done, we celebrated with loaves of bread dipped into bowls of warm sauce. Next came the canning of jars and jars of roasted marinara sauce, enough to give away to friends and fill a shelf in my daughter’s pantry. 

At the days end, before getting into the car to drive home, as always, I stood in the driveway looking up at the redwood trees. When it’s time to leave my heart’s home in the mountains, I always have the same feeling as I do when I leave the ocean, before I begin to walk the three blocks back to my place. I always linger, never wanting to leave the trees or the water. 
 
This afternoon, after resting up for a while, I was able to catch up with all of the things on my want-to-do list. I finished answering my reader e-mail. Oh, for joy, I love reading and responding to my reader email. I’m greatly honored so many have cared enough to read my new memoir and take the time to write to me. I also love the Readers Circle and the Book Club gatherings I’ve been invited take part in. Often it leaves me feeling the way I do after meeting up and reuniting with long-time, dear friends. 
 
All summer my highest priority (after my writing work is done) has been on home care. Long ago when my three kids were growing up it occurred to me that I needed to view home care as a beloved hobby, or else our home would never be well cared for. 
 
Last week I completed the number one project that has been on my home care want-to-do-list for a very long time. I finished getting my clothes closet organized and took a bag of things I haven't been wearing to the thrift store. And I’ve added more color and artwork making everything come together for us as a peaceful place to live. Truth to tell, it’s almost too small of a space, and it took me a long time to figure out how to make it come alive without feeling cramped. 

But we wanted to live in a small space—and now my wish has come true. Sometimes it takes a while to learn to grow into the things we long for. My biggest challenge is that four-draw unit that holds my t-shirts, socks, underwear, jeans, sweat pants and hoodies, needs to be inside the closet, because the chair and book shelf fills the room. This means there isn’t enough hanging space for the nicer clothes I’d like to hang in the closet. My solution was to get rid of more clothes! When we made the decision to move into a small space, I wondered how we would manage with one bathroom with grandkids and friends all about, yet it’s working out well. 

Thinking about my small space living reminds me that I love cooking in my small galley kitchen—and it’s time to start cooking dinner. We have garden fresh picked zucchini, basil—and roasted marinara sauce. While the water begins to boil for pasta, I think about patience, faith and openness, that’s what small space living has to teach. 

Happier with Less Follow along with me.
Copyright Terra Trevor 2015-2026
Theme:
When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a wood-carver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year. —Annie Dillard


We Who Walk the Seven Ways is Terra Trevor’s memoir about seeking healing and finding belonging. After she endured a difficult loss, a circle of Native women elders embraced and guided Trevor (mixed-blood Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca, and German) through the seven cycles of life in Indigenous ways. Over three decades, these women lifted her from grief, instructed her in living, and showed her how to age from youth into beauty. 

With tender honesty, Trevor explores how every ending is always a beginning. Her reflections on the deep power of women’s friendship, losing a child, reconciling complicated roots, and finding richness in every stage of life show that being an American Indian with a complex lineage is not about being part something, but about being part of something. 

University of Nebraska Press | Barns & Noble| Bookshop & IndieBound | Amazon

“Terra Trevor’s memoir is a gentle invitation to journey with her across decades, an invitation to notice with her as she seeks healing and finds belonging. There were phrases and sentences I underlined, places where I wept, passages that will remain with me as they drew me to insights I’d previously struggled to name. I closed the final pages and knew that in reading this book, I had been the recipient of a generous and much-needed gift. While I can certainly finish a book in a day, I chose to move slowly through this one, letting each idea, each paragraph, each reflection gently spill over me, allowing the pages to alter me in some way.” —Patrice Gopo, author of Autumn Song: Essays on Absence

 "Terra Trevor’s Pushing up the Sky is a revelation of the struggles and triumphs packed into the hyphens between Korean and Native American and American. From her, we learn that adoption can best be mutual, that the adoptive parent needs acculturation in the child’s ways. With unflinching honesty and unfailing love, Trevor details the risks and heartaches of taking in, the bittersweetness of letting go, and the everlasting bonds that grow between them all. With ‘Pushing up the Sky’, the ‘literature of adoption’ comes of age as literature, worthy of an honored place in the human story." —Robert Bensen, editor of Children of the Dragonfly: Native American Voices on Child Custody and Education