give that world to someone else

Now that we’ve decided to move, everything has taken on a sort of vibrating, electric quality. I walk through my house, imagining strangers padding through here, judging, assessing, placing a financial assessment on the 1,032 square feet we have loved in, labored in, played in, potty-trained in, learned to walk in, taught to talk in, adorned with photographs of family and art. How dare they shake their head at that wallpaper! How dare they dismiss that room as too small? How dare they consider knocking down the redwood pergola my slightly gap-toothed builder crush Luis built with his bare hands, or worse, the walls of bookshelves my actualized crush (husband) built with his bare hands? The two spring nights he spent sweating on our porch sanding the wood and cleaning the pipes, before coming in for bed, smelling sharply of earth and iron? How dare?

But wait, I could live in this house forever!!!!!!!!!!!! I don’t ever need to move! But then I worry that some day soon, Rowan or Zoe will become like the unseen teen daughter in Paolo Sorrentini’s Hand of God, and never, ever come out of our one bathroom, and that will become highly problematic because I am well-hydrated and need to pee often. And I sure would love a living room big enough to fit a sectional (“More Ways to Lie Down” is near the top of my life wishlist), and a living room far enough away from the bedroom doors of both children that they can’t look right at me when they poke their insolent faces out of their doors, long after we’ve said our goodnights. And of course, it’d be nice to be a dream to be able to host a family or a friend overnight, like, ever. To not have to say to our mothers and fathers, “Find yourself an Airbnb.”

The real estate market in Los Angeles is, as they say, OUT. OF. CONTROL. We looked at an absolute shithole in Pasadena today that is ludicrously priced at 1.3 million dollars. I watched a rat scurry over the sunroom’s parapet just after our realtor shook his head, looked at us and said “No. I’m sorry, but this is not your home.” Which, of course, we knew, as soon as we stepped into the drafty living room, shuddered at the sight of the kitchen.

Of course, every house is a shithole after seeing my DREAM HOME yesterday. I’m telling you my eyes BURNED WITH HOT TEARS at first sight of the original 1930s bathroom tile in this place…I came home triumphant, sweating at the possibility, the COMPULSORY REQUISITE FACT of our new life in this house and Tyler grumbled about the cost before I said just. shut. up and get in the car and drive over there and go look at it while the kids were in quiet time. He called me from the house (per my demand) and in his low voice he reserves for his most serious of sentiments, he pronounced, “Drain the bank account. Burn it all. We have to live here.”

It will probably go up to 2 million dollars or some other irrealizable succubus price and I will weep and curse the stars and we will “find another home” that is “just as good” and “right for us” but I may…may…just never survive the devastation.

(Rowan’s drawing from last night)

Coincidentally, I am reading Real Estate by Deborah Levy, which is a meditation on the desire for and meaning behind an “ideal home.”

“If real estate is a self-portrait and a class portrait, it is also a body arranging its limbs to seduce. I couldn’t work out why real estate wasn’t flirting with me more intensely, its swooning eyes making me all kinds of offers I couldn’t refuse.”

I have been seduced, utterly. I am ready to move mountains just to live in this home for the rest of my life. I would never need anything else. I don’t know how the owner of this house could ever leave - could ever want for more. Of course, that might be what someone will be thinking about this house, this perfect, tiny, blue, 110 year-old Craftsman. Things may be perfect, but if you allow yourself to be beguiled by another, the jig is up. That’s, after all, what walls are for.

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” -Georgia O’Keeffe, 1946