We are wandering now, #1
We sold our house. We put our things in storage. We ran away. The story of my family’s escape begins in 3…2…1…
“I think I’ve found one.” It’s Molly calling me from the car. I’m at work.
She’s driving Minneapolis neighborhoods this afternoon in our blue Saturn, looking at houses. Now she’s parked in front of a brick house on a corner. It’s across the street from a golf course. It’s for sale and it’s cheap. I look it up online and learn that the golf course is groomed every winter for nordic skiing.
Minutes later, I’m on the house’s front steps. No one’s lived here for months. The only recent visitors were geese, their footprints fresh in a dusting of snow. Single story, two bedrooms, one bath. Someone painted it white once, but the paint has yellowed. Now it looks like a dirty set of teeth. It’s in a neighborhood of not-so-big houses with narrow lawns, some chain link fence.
I don’t know it yet, but this will be home for 13 years.
We will go inside the house the next day with our realtor and see the decay and worn floorboards, the hollow-core doors and false ceilings, the masking tape stuck on a long crack in an otherwise beautiful pocket door made of oak. In the basement we will find another goose, this one stuffed and hanging from the ceiling joists by a wire. The previous owner was an amateur taxidermist. The bird’s wings are outstretched, as if coming in for a landing.
We have almost no money, so we buy this cheap house with bad paint and a goose in the basement and consider ourselves lucky to have found a house with a view. We spend months tearing it apart before we move in. I sleep in a sleeping bag on the living room floor at first. We make it liveable and move in three months after we buy it. Then more work.
The woodwork, the floors, the ceilings, the walls: all get replaced, or refinished, or painted. We remove cheap doors, replace cheap windows and pull up layers of linoleum, go hunting through salvage yards for era-appropriate replacements, make a choice to keep the chandelier, which looks original. We rip out carpeting, tile the front porch and then, because the tiling has gone well, tile the front steps with hundreds of smaller tiles. This takes weeks.
The weeks become years, and while we’re replacing, rewiring and plumbing, life happens. We make friends. There are good people here. We fall into routines. We have one perfect beautiful baby boy, and I make plans to plant Blue Heaven grass in our front yard because it’s Molly and me and baby makes three. And then we have another perfect beautiful baby boy, and we somehow can’t convince ourselves that we have a second baby. We sometimes say to one another, “We have a baby!” We feel like idiots for this inability to comprehend what is happening to us.
We have birthday parties, and first days of walking, and first words, and adventures to the nearby lake, and cycling journeys to the park. We see the Mallard ducks each spring arrive in numbers, careening across the water on their bellies as they land. We see the Monarchs each fall arise from the garden like slips of paper blowing in the wind for their migration to Mexico. We walk and ski the deserted golf course in the winter. It feels like our private reserve.
The golf course becomes a place I go to when I need to clear my mind. It’s the place I go to after Molly’s father dies, after a colleague with everything to live for commits suicide. Faced with these things, we retreat into the house. It becomes our refuge when the world seems meaningless and cruel. We distract ourselves with talk of a new roof, of a final renovation project.
All of this happens, and so much more. And then one night Molly and I find ourselves talking about this house, this brick safehouse that we have so lovingly restored, this once-rundown and forgotten place that Molly has painted so beautifully with rich browns and reds. It looks so wonderfully alive and beautiful and radiant, a look that inspires one neighborhood boy to walk past and say, his eyes hungry, “It looks like CHOCOLATE!”
We’ve outgrown this house. And our lives have become so busy here that we hardly see each other. And like an alarm has gone off, we know it’s time to sell. And not only that. We want to leave. At least for a while. We will go somewhere and let the clock unwind slowly and hug our sons and each other. And we do.
But on that day when it began, when Molly called to tell me about the house and I found myself standing on the front steps looking at the footprints in the snow, I know none of what’s to come. Of course. Life is a void into which we throw hope and aspiration.
In my hand is the realtor’s card. This house with its dirty teeth paint and false surfaces and a long-dead goose hanging in the basement looks like the kind of place someone with sense would tear down.
We’ll buy it tomorrow.
