There on the computer screen, to my astonishment, was my little house, our red Jetta parked in the front, the hydrangeas in full bloom.Īlmost immediately, I fantasized about the improvements we would make one day, after we refinanced and were both making more money. When I heard about Google Earth, the first place I searched for was my house on 61 st Street. I imagined that I could see it from space with a powerful telescope and wondered what its exact coordinates were. That little plot of dirt and grass and house was mine, my speck of Earth. And we would find a way to coax the avocado tree, which had once born two avocados ten years ago, into bearing fruit again. We would harvest the plums and make jam to give away at Christmas. We would buy a small table with an umbrella and four chairs. On our first night in the house in 2006, the girls tucked in their beds, my first husband and I sat in the backyard, our bare feet in the grass, and made plans. When it wasn’t too hot, we ate at the small rectangular table and, through the windows, admired the patch of purple and white irises that had sprung up as if Van Gogh had visited in the night. This was where we kept most of the girls’ toys-the Legos and little figurines that they played with while I read stretched out on the futon, basking in the room’s buttery light. I loved the bedroom the girls shared and its two large windows that filled the room with light as soon as the sun came up. When they were old enough, I imagined calling them in for dinner and seeing only the bottoms of their bare feet, swinging back and forth. But I loved the tree in the front yard with limbs low enough that I could lift my daughters into it. Even the cats, who’d torn up every other set of curtains that I had ever owned, despised them and left them alone. And I hated the blinds that hung in almost all the rooms. There was hardly any storage, not even a hall closet. Still, I loved that little house with its yellow siding and green trim. The house I lost as an adult had two bedrooms, a small backyard, and no garage. The house I lost as an adult and the house I lost as a child. You can’t argue with a curse, real or imagined.Īnd there, in my mind’s eye, is not one house, but two. But I’d be singing to myself now because he would have left the room. People like us? You mean people like you. I love my job I’m not going to retire anyway. We won’t be able to retire until we’re seventy-five. His voice would be especially twangy on that line. The word “mortgage” is French for “death pledge.” You can pick up and leave whenever you want.įree spirit? You haven’t left the state in five years. There was my voice, high and clear: A house is a money pit.Īnd his answering call: A house is an investment. He wasn’t interested in hearing them again, but I could not stop myself from rehashing them, point and counterpoint, like a country duet. I had been too busy listing the reasons why we shouldn’t buy a house, reasons that we’d already discussed, argued, fought over a dozen times. I tried to lose myself in a book, but after two pages, the words remained scratch marks, practically hieroglyphics. I wanted to look over his shoulder, but I finally had to leave the room. The idea of a house sparked, simultaneously, a singed hope and a wild, beating dread. Last night my husband filled out an application for a home loan while I scoured the forks, the sink, then attacked the coffee stain on the counter, so porous with age everything stains it.
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