Deidre Woollard
Jul 24, 2017 · 4 min read

I drove two hours to stand across the street from a house. There’s nothing special about this house. It’s not in an exotic location, it’s not exceptionally beautiful. I’ve been looking at it for weeks online, checking to see if the different portals would have different images.

When you live in Los Angeles and are unsuccessful, you stop dreaming of home. Home becomes a place you rent and worry about your landlord deciding your tenancy is over. Home becomes a place where you see rents going up around you and wonder when it will happen to you, when the water sitting at the nub of your chin will rise up to drown you. You think of neighborhoods not in terms of whether or not you would like to live there but whether you could afford to. You stop dreaming.

I owned once before when I lived outside of Boston. It didn’t do much for me. I was young and not deeply attached to anything or anyone. I sold in five years, made a decent profit and walked away. Now I stalk that house online like an old lover, showing new friends what I once had. That solid door, that long hallway, those beautiful gumwood details and the bay window. Look, I was someone once, I owned something.

Dreams are quicksilver, they don’t disappear, they just change shape. And so, relentlessly priced out of this market, and most of the California coast, I started to dream of the desert. It wasn’t just the price. The high desert of the Morongo Valley is like an alien planet, scrubbed raw and prone to extremes. The real estate, even at the highest of the boom we are currently in, remains reasonable. Who would want to live where you cannot have a lawn, where it’s baking hot in summer and snows in the winter. Where you are two hours from the city and the architecture is mostly new, mostly developments, mostly ugly. And yet, I’ve clung to Yucca Valley as my Los Angeles escape hatch.

I spotted the house two months ago when it was listed as a rental. Priced a little less than where I currently live, it has three bedrooms, two baths and a porch. It’s a real house. For the last fourteen years I’ve lived in guest houses and bungalows, good houses but always small. I’ve become a minimalist but I’m never sure if that’s the houses or me just trying to fit into them.

This house has 1600 square feet. Modest by most standards but more than enough for me. It sits on less than half an acre short road in a neighborhood established during the 1960s. The listing calls it a mid-century modern but it’s really just a happy little ranch house with a garage. Nothing special. You can’t always explain the coup de foudre. You can look at a person online or a potential pet or a house and just know.

Love doesn’t always lead to completion. Love is sometimes unfulfilled. That makes it no less real. I crept up to the house like it would never be mine. All those “if onlys” swimming in my brain. If only I had earned more, saved more, done more. I was conscious of how remote it was, how foolish it would be to just move out here, the kind of desert nothing town that kids who are born there can’t wait to leave.

I didn’t call the realtor, I don’t need the tour. I know there are secrets the house is hiding. I want to see it but I also know that taking that next step would have consequences, if I got inside, how far would I go to make it mine?

In The Best of Us, Joyce Maynard’s new memoir of love and loss, real estate plays a strong role. In her darkest hour, a house becomes a beacon of hope, the promise of a future in a different direction, a reason to hang on.

This house is that for me, a potential path. I can see myself in this desert community, living, writing, far from the traffic and the relentless hype of the city. I stopped off at Starbucks and wrote for an hour or two, then went back to the house just as the sun was setting, to see her one last time during golden hour. I set out toward home, navigating the quiet roads toward the mountain pass. In the twilight, a soft dun-colored jackrabbit left across the road. I’m calling it a sign.

Deidre Woollard

Written by

History nerd, weirdo, introvert with a love of lore. Always busy reading all the things.

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