Eenie, Meenie, Minie, Moe

A trip my husband and I took to Taos, New Mexico, is still one of my favorite vacations ever. How we ended up choosing to go there on our trip was that it occurred to me I had never been to a hot spring. Upon realizing this, I pulled out an atlas, flipped to a map of the United States, and ran my eyes over the pages. Colorado Springs having the word springs in its name made it my index finger’s first stop. This was a long time ago now, so I don’t remember exactly what happened as I pointed it out to my husband, but I think he may have remarked that a work colleague had been to hot springs near Taos and should we maybe go there? It was all so straightforward and direct and quite easily planned, even in those days before the rise of the Internet.

If only deciding where to live had been so simple.

We ended up residing in our small-city rowhouse for eighteen years, but I understood well before then that it had come time to move. My husband was slower to be convinced of this. Eventually he joined me in looking at houses online, though, and when we became more serious in our efforts, we went together to look at houses in person. This continued on and off for approximately seven years before we bought our current house. The number of years it took—or that the process can be measured in years—sounds crazy even to me. When we started, we were bundling our little bundle of joy into a car seat. When we finished, he was doing higher math. I suppose our excuse for taking so long is that it’s hard to voluntarily go through the inconvenience and expense and complete upheaval that moving house can represent, at least the way we did it, which was like ripping a Band-Aid off slowly but still catching a hair every time you pull. In other words: ouch.     

It’s one thing if you have to move. Like because of a work transfer, or because your lease is up or your relatives are giving you the heave-ho. “Maybe it’s time for a change” is a bit more nebulous and somewhat less urgently motivating. And the fact that home consists of both the dwelling itself and the place where it’s situated, which in turn consists of the city, town, or village as well as the specific street, road, development, or neighborhood, makes it a whole lot of choices for people who have a difficult time making them.

A neighbor we chat with sometimes, our dogs being quite good friends, said that she and her husband have been toying for years with the idea of moving to somewhere a bit warmer, and now that the kids will be out of the house, it might be the time to make the break. But she also said, “We probably won’t.”

An object at rest tends to stay at rest.                        

In the novel The Shipping News, which I reread last year for the sheer pleasure of re-experiencing how much I love that book, the Big Move the heroes of the story make is prompted by a notion as appealing, or dare I say romantic, as you can get: the fresh start. They move house because they need a do-over. Plenty of novels feature a similar scenario—same trope, different details. Anyway, it worked for them.

We needed a fresh start too, but our circumstances were much more run-of-the-mill. Boring, even. We wanted a different school for our son, a bigger buffer from neighbors, and more space for our crap. The house we ultimately bought, and the locale we bought into, fulfilled our criteria. But it sure took us a long time to move fifteen miles.

Where we lived had many advantages: a friendly neighborhood, libraries and a movie theater within an easy walk, no driveway to shovel when it snowed, and an enviable twelve-minute commute for my husband via shoe-leather express. Honestly, we might still be hemming and hawing over whether we should move at all, but the tipping point came. Our son’s sports equipment outgrew his closet. My husband’s increasing collection of bikes in need of repair took over the small guest room. Another round of distressingly inconsiderate neighbors moved in next door to us. And my son told me that every day at the school he had been attending for two years felt like he was going there for the first time—he found it that unfriendly. Basta, I thought. Enough.

That moment occurred toward the end of June, which gave us until September, when by the laws of both the state and good parenting our son needed to be enrolled in a school somewhere. This really was not enough time. Good thing we’d already been looking for seven years.   

Once we settled on which town we wanted to move to, which turned out to be in the far reaches of the same county we were already residents of, the process of selecting a house, if not the purchase process itself, happened very quickly. At that moment in time, I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of houses on the market where we had decided eenie, meenie, minie, moe style where wanted to live, and my husband zeroed in on the listing of the house we did in fact buy. A person could interpret that as the Universe standing there and shouting at us to just go ahead and write the damn check for the deposit, which we did: from our first tour of the house to when we made an offer was a matter of days. When your search for home is characterized by an I’ll-know-it-when-I-see-it approach, you have to trust that when you know, you know.            

But that was the endpoint of the home-hunting journey, after the boundaries of where home would be were circumscribed and I’d conceded that the sky was not the limit, that we were choosing only which suburb my husband could easily commute to his job from, not which continent to live on.

I had wanted to find my continent, and I left this area for a little while after I first arrived here. Then I drifted back, and though I hadn’t necessarily intended to stay, I did, for a whole lot of reasons. We’ve remained in this general vicinity, with a brief stint living forty-five minutes southward, which amounted to unfamiliar territory in this region that tends to look north, and maybe west on a clear day.

Given that I’d built a life here for three decades, it wouldn’t be going out on a limb, then, to say I’d already made a de facto commitment to this region. It was probably time to accept that when I looked at the map and it read “You Are Here,” that meant me. But wound up in the ball of wool that is house and home are our disparate needs for both stability and freedom, and they can get a little tangled. I was aware of the enormity, to our small family, of committing to a home where our son could continue to grow up. Because once we moved, we’d be staying put, at least until he was out of school, to allow him the chance to cultivate a sense of belonging. I was aware as well of the cloud of finality that hovered over our decision, as it occurred to me that this could quite possibly even be our forever home. Having already invested so much time, money, elbow grease, and care in two other structures, we—or at least my husband—had declared that whatever house we bought would be the last one we own. The next place, if there is a next place, might have to be a nice rental where someone else takes care of the repairs and improvements. It’s not that this house we were choosing signified the end of all adventures, just that it would be our exclusive launching point for them.

Early on in our search, when our son was a toddler, my husband and I did our best to nudge the limits of where we could practicably move to outward, into a neighboring state. The location would have maintained the connection to our existing life but been different enough to meet the standard of change we were seeking. It was, however, a far-enough drive away from where my husband works that even toying with this option took real consideration.

We strained our eyes to see possibility in the houses we asked the real estate agents to show us, a way of making those houses work out where there wasn’t any, at least not for us. I remember sitting in the car one night, in the driveway of an abandoned house that we’d looked at twice, listening to the ambient sounds, immersing ourselves in the darkness and relative remoteness, absorbing the atmosphere to better feel how we’d feel about it, endeavoring to convince ourselves and each other that this was the place.

The reverie ended after the carpenter we’d hired to give us an informed opinion confirmed what we should have accepted from the start: that the house had grievous structural issues, and that even if it was worthy of saving, which we thought it was, people with more skills and deeper pockets than we had, and also perhaps people who didn’t have a young child and weren’t employed full-time, should be the ones to buy it. When this became the narrative with all the properties we looked at, we ended up dropping our pursuit in that neck of the woods.

Unfortunately for the real estate agent, who I’m quite sure loathed us after about the third house showing, it took longer than it probably should have for us to learn that if the pieces don’t fall readily into place—or if the pieces of you don’t fall into a place—it probably isn’t the right home for you.

We went back to the drawing board, casually but persistently continuing our hunt. I kept an eye on the local newspaper’s real estate section, prospecting for open houses. I examined the photos accompanying online listings for the real story they had to tell. I signed up for new-inventory alerts.

Even my weekend long runs became a home-hunting opportunity, since my various routes took me through our choices in a microcosm. I began my run in our neighborhood of small, modest rowhouses, then passed into the section of much-larger, ornate rowhouses that had been the city homes of the wealthiest of the wealthy, back in the day. With barely a thought, I eliminated these as an option. In addition to being out of our price range, these beautiful houses were more money and responsibility to maintain or restore than we had the ability to take on. And although some of these buildings came with a backyard, sometimes they didn’t, and I wanted a garden that was bigger, not smaller, than I already had. I also wanted out of the city, which we had lived in for more than two decades. I needed a change of scenery.

Our area is abundant with excellent housing stock, and farther uptown the nineteenth century gave way to the early to mid twentieth century, the streetscape morphing from tall, narrow rowhouses to low, settled bungalows. The yards were a smidge bigger uptown too, as would be expected. The neighborhoods were still dense, and actually even more walkable—with less street crime and more to walk to—than farther downtown. This was where I had wanted to live when we first bought a house. And as I ran, I engaged in a version of window shopping, picking out my favorite houses and yards, and visualizing us living in them. The problem, though, was that when we actually went with a real estate agent to some houses up yonder, I wasn’t at all able to visualize us living in them. That ship had sailed. It wasn’t what I wanted anymore.

By the farthest point of my run, I would make it out to what is still managing to hang on as farmland, and get a tantalizing glimpse before looping back. Then, en route for home, I’d pass rapidly built new construction on tightly constrained lots that I knew wasn’t a good match for our family. Another house category and another milieu summarily crossed off the list.

The next town over, which was not in my standard rotation of running routes but was quickly reached by bicycle, would have been a viable option, had we actually wanted to live there. Nice as it is, though, with its plethora of 1940s-era houses and human-scale business district, we never connected with the place. Too bad, because that would have been a no-brainer.

Hopping into our car brought more choices and better results, or at least some nice day trips, as we put ourselves though the “Could we” and “Should we” and the “Maybe” that goes with attempting to insert yourself into a different environment and, by extension, a different life.

My family moved a few times when I was growing up, and even as a kid I relished outings that involved going to look at houses. I found the sense of possibility delicious. Of course, practicalities weren’t my concern then, but now that they were my concern, deciding on a home should nonetheless have been made easier by the fact that our roaming range was limited to within an hour’s drive of where we were already living.

If we’d been casting our fishing line out a bit farther, if we’d been choosing to go, as the song says, “where the weather suits my clothes,” the set of considerations would have been different. Although maybe, since we’d still be us no matter where we went, it would be only what we could choose from that changed.

In The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well, which I read recently, the author related how a self-described introverted student attending one of his lectures rejected her home turf, the United States, characterizing it as a country of extroverts. Apparently she preferred Denmark for its cultural inclination toward home-based, small-group socializing. My own attention was grabbed by the information that Denmark experiences, on average, 179 days of rain each year. Allowed a choice between that and a climate of hot, cloudless days, I know where my own allegiance would lie. Excuse me while I go pack my favorite umbrella.

I used to be friendly with a Canadian-by-birth who, coming as she did from a vast and relatively unpopulated realm, dismissed the idea of living in her husband’s native country, England, which she found too crowded for her taste. I’ve spent time in both countries, and I think she may have been overreacting. Granted, most of us have our standards or bugaboos or hypersensitivities.

I’d like to believe, though, that wherever I land, I’m adaptable enough to at least try to make a go of things; it could be, however, that I’m giving myself more credit than is due. During one summer vacation a few hours to the northeast, I was all ready to start shopping for a small homestead on the lovely large island we were staying on. But my dreams pooled around me like melted ice cream when I realized that the water or the air or something else about the place didn’t agree with my hair, which had been a frizzy, unmanageable mess our entire stay. I defy anyone to tell me that isn’t a darn good reason to look elsewhere for real estate.

These weren’t, however, choices we needed to make. The thumbtack marking “You Are Here” on our map was pretty firmly embedded.

But even just pivoting around that single point of our current home left vast swaths to explore. Maybe “explore” is too strong a word, given our long familiarity with the region. But I’m a gardener, and I know that within the overarching USDA Hardiness Zone we garden in, there are always microclimates. So what my family and I needed to determine was the one where we would best thrive. Right plant, right place.

There we were, though, still lost in the weeds.

We went about picking off the low-hanging fruit, excluding what we knew with certainty we didn’t want or couldn’t have. We looked into various school districts’ offerings, successes, and drawbacks. We selected parameters for properties and houses, clicking the boxes to filter for the perfect combination of number of bathrooms, bedrooms, and floors, as well as lot size, water and sewer configurations, and heating type. I confess that, always wanting to be open to the possibilities, I often retained the default selection “Any,” which admittedly didn’t help with the winnowing.

In the tug-of-war between location and house, a friendly competition to determine which would win out, we’d feel the pull of one, then the other. Until we stopped the game, chose the spot, and found the house.

My husband got the old house he, especially, wanted, and the ability to bike commute on pleasant days when he can get out of the house early enough. I gained a larger yard to garden in, and at least a few amenities within a short walk so that I don’t always need to rely on a car. My son lucked out too: his short walk to and from his new elementary school included wading through creeks just for the fun of it, and as he got older he could head out for a bike ride or a run without either of his parents having to tag along. He’s growing up happy and healthy. End of story.

But of course it isn’t the end of the story. The point of the search wasn’t to move elsewhere, even to a local elsewhere, and stagnate. It wasn’t to buy a house and then just sit there and say, “Okay, all done.” Life happened while our search was going on at a simmer on the back burner, and life continues to happen now that we’re four-plus years into our new You Are Here. It amazes me how I can live a completely different life only fifteen miles away. Not better, not worse, just different.

With some reservations—always with some reservations—I really like where we’ve chosen to live and the house we’ve chosen to live in. My husband says it’s his dream house, and I feel that way most days, though not always when something else has broken, because then what is it? A house of broken dreams?

I’d love to be someone who lives in the moment all the time. Best I can do is some of the time. I suffer from, if it can be called suffering, what Melody Warnick, who writes, lectures, and coaches on the topic of place attachment, refers to as restless-soul syndrome. And I sometimes struggle with instead of being comforted by the thought that the walls I’m staring at now might be the same ones I’ll be staring at in ten years, although one can hope they’ll no longer have that flowered wallpaper on them. But while I’m here and living my life—and at this particular moment enjoying the feeling of the woodstove’s heat on my cold toes—I am also looking to start a conversation about what and where is next. And maybe I’ll just sneak a peak at the real estate section, but in a different newspaper.