Ben and I bought a house in our favorite neighborhood in the fall of 2019. It was a tiny red cottage that could pass as a camp cabin in the north woods. Instead, it happened to be settled in a tiny urban art district of our city. Inside, the plaster walls were cracking and coming down in chunks. Several gas leaks were discovered upon inspection. Floor tiles chipped as our shoes passed over them and there was an eery feeling one might fall through the stairway if not careful. But there were also treasures: a framed black and white photograph of Ronald Regan in the dining room, a beautiful crystal doorknob, a front door with a skeleton key positioned in the keyhole, and a 1950s painting of a lone cowboy.
Ben and I are typically drawn to houses in serious need of love. We tour a curious house simply because it piques our interest and we wonder how bad the interior can be. Over the past six years we have placed bids on a handful of older homes in our city. Homes with giant oak and elm trees and floors that gloriously rock and groan. Homes hosting quirky, dreamy little rooms with floor to ceiling windows that could make the best art studio or cozy attic libraries with their slanted ceilings. I adored a home once owned by a painter who had no less than 200 big, beautiful oil paintings overlapping his expansive bookshelves. This artist had died several years before and the house, his books and busts, paintings and plants just sat. Entering his home was a museum- it was beautiful and also existential. We considered homes that were gutted and then abandoned with no record of what taxes would be because it had once been property of the adjoining synagogue. We tried so hard to buy the home that had a bathroom without walls but a guest house that my sister-in-law was ready to rent for her gyrotonic studio. We know the homes next to Kate’s parents with their deep, urban forest backyard. We wander the neglected overgrown gardens that you can tell were once abundant in roses and wildflowers. These homes carry stories that I love to try to see. All of these homes were just a touch too expensive for the work that needed to be done. All of them needed to be gutted and restored to their intended glory. We put in bids we could afford, we dreamed for two days while we were considered, and then let the dream go when someone had more cash. We try not to drive by these houses too often to see what could have been.
Fall of 2019, however, we found ourselves agreeing that the little red cabin could be a once in a lifetime opportunity and our offer was accepted. At the time of purchase, several families we loved lived one or two blocks away from this little piece of property. Lake Michigan, sweet friends, shops/ restaurants/ ice cream, an el stop, and a Metra stop were in walking distance. In February 2020, an architect stamped his approval on plans for a stunning restoration that Ben had drawn and designed for the house. We could starting building by summer. We imagined so many things that this new home would provide. Our kids would be able to walk one block to Sesame Street or cross the street to the twinkle lit front porches of their friend’s homes. Just before we turned the stamped plans in to the city, Ben and I spent a weekend in the Fulton River District for my birthday. While strolling through streets way too hip and young for the likes of us, I asked if we could pause for a minute and really assess whether we had the sincere energy for another home project while also raising young kids. We could submit the plans in March 2020. No big deal.
I don’t think I have to spell out the uncertainty and chaos that mid-March 2020 brought. Our lives, the lives of people we loved dearly, and the places we frequented all turned inside out along with the rest of the world. I think of the science experiment where you add pepper flakes to a shallow bowl of water and then drop the tiniest bit of dish soap in the center of the bowl to break the water’s surface tension. The pepper flakes rapidly repel and spread out away from the soap epicenter. What used to be a collection of like-matter explodes, splits, and the collective is no longer. Part of my 2020 experience included a big, unwanted, drop of soap touching down on our sweet spaces and people.
Lately, I have big feelings anytime I hear or read anyone’s account of February, March, April, May of 2020. I believe this is a delayed counter effect of the emotional shut down many of us needed to do in order to move through that season of the pandemic. Thawing from that experience took more time than expected. I noticed the first hint of a thaw in 2023 when my kid’s favorite podcast had a tiny listener ask how they produced the show in April of 2020. This simple question and answer brought me so much unexpected grief. I realize that I am certainly not alone in this painful after-processing and that our losses were mild compared to those that experienced significant illness, death, neglect, abuse, and loss of careers. I imagine there are others out there who find themselves blissfully driving along an interstate when suddenly something on the radio just brings the flood of emotions.
Like everything else, our home-building dream turned inside out and warped. It took a few years to completely accept. We sold the little red house exactly a year ago. (Another time you can ask me about the overgrown yet communally protected memorial pine tree, the ice shed that traveled throughout Wisconsin in the beginning of the 20th century but was now rotting in the backyard (also communally protected), the price of lumber in 2021, the brief hope we had in Ron, the petrified body of a flying squirrel in the bathtub, and the abandoned Valli Grocery shopping cart (that Bailey and her mother saw first!) in the driveway that finally signaled this dream was dead.) I also have a really, really good realtor recommendation!
This past fall I expand our search to upstate New York and Vermont just for fun. Ben zeroes in on Rhinebeck, New York after enjoying a delicious falafel sandwich in their downtown followed by a breathtaking mountain view of the Catskills this past August. But our families are here in Chicago-land and we know that this is the exact time to be with them. And once in a while friends decide to stay and buy buildings themselves and they become family. Things will be different when we are twelve years older but right now, this is where we love and are loved.
So here we are: unmoved from the small house we gutted/ continue to restore with Ben’s talent and our hands. We groan at the amount of work that is still ahead if we choose to stay here for another ten years. We should win a Nobel Peace Prize for the wildlife that we allow to live in our roof. I realize that it is such a gift to have a home but I question if it is dull to stay in one space for so many years when my social media is filled with world-schooling, sleepy oceanside towns, and so many friends who have relocated to the mountains or other fascinating cities.
But as I cool down from a Saturday morning run, I find our playwright neighbor out in the front yard with her aging white cat. “He’s too blind to be out here alone anymore. We now come out here together so I can supervise. He mostly sits and talks to the fern,” she explains, pulling her sweater around her tiny frame because it is cooler than we expected. Indeed the cat is meowing at the lone fern. It is in moments like these that the mundane becomes magical. I have hundreds of these stories from this street that we didn’t plan to stay on for more than a few years. I share in these tiny moments of ordinary beauty, knowing that one day I will look back with nostalgia at this very chapter of my life and want to spend a few moments here again. Participating.
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