Hello. Wipe your feet on the doormat and, please, come in to House Doodles, the notebook of my growing collection of essays, short stories, daydreams, and doodles where I contemplate houses and life in them.

I’m an old-house dweller, and old houses have a way of keeping themselves foremost in your mind. I suppose, just like the people who live in them, they don’t want to be forgotten, disregarded, cast aside. Babies cry, dogs scratch at the door, and old houses’ roofs leak, as does the plumbing. And by the way, the plaster is cracked and the siding sure needs to be scraped and painted. Hard to ignore all that. And then there you find yourself, fully invested, in more ways than one.

My preoccupation with houses and life in them predates the official stamp on the deed to the first old house my husband and I bought. In fact, I got hooked on houses quite young: I clearly remember being in the fourth grade and drawing and discussing versions of my dream house with a couple of classmates who were at work on designs of their own. Oh, the possibilities.

Anyone who has the responsibility of a house knows there is almost always something you can be doing to take care of the daily campsite chores, so to speak; that is, the subsistence side of living. Houses, however, have higher aspirations and a corresponding limitless capacity to absorb our ambitions. I’ll allow the ambiguity of that last sentence to stand, but I’ll also explain that what I mean is, houses can both prompt and be on the receiving end of our willingness to look at something and realize, This could be better. And that’s a good thing. Personally, I’ve also found that it’s expensive.

Housing as a phenomenon is universal, but the forms it takes are innumerable. I can only say thank goodness for that. Otherwise, what a boring world it might be. But whatever the form—whether a no-frills temporary apartment, or a breathtaking manor house that’s been in the family for ten generations, or a twenty-first-century tiny house—we coexist and interact with these structures we live in. They’re nonsentient organisms that evolve alongside us. It’s a pretty intimate relationship.

They are also the facades, quite literally, we present to the world. And me, I’m always curious about the authentic story going on behind the facade. I wonder about the how, the when, and the what of people’s lives. I have an observer’s fascination with the truth, and an honest desire to understand things, so a peek inside the house is always of interest. Besides, I want to check out the interior design.

The essays on House Doodles explore what has appealed to me about houses and, on the contrary, what has made me want to run screaming in the other direction. The essays also explore the choices, conscious or unconscious, I’ve made in relation to my life in houses, because for some of us, not reevaluating the choices we’ve made isn’t an option. And although my decision-making muscles are often stuck in a state of paralysis, I’ve also taken some pretty big leaps without looking. My thought process in those cases, if there was a thought process, must have been something along the lines of, if we knew ahead of time what we were in for, most of us would never actually do anything, so maybe sometimes you just have to close your eyes and jump. And so it’s been with me and houses.

Thanks for reading (or listening).

—House Doodles