Happy house anniversary
Eleven years ago today, Chris and I closed on this house. I still remember the exhiliration of being handed those keys. We walked over immediately and let ourselves into the empty, echoing rooms.
When I think back on it now, we kind of rushed into this relationship. We decided to move to Northampton in the summer of 1999; rented an apartment on Hawley Street in late October. A scant six months later, we’d bought a house. Not just any house — a huge, old two-family house with a TON OF WORK TO BE DONE.
Most days when I look at our house, I see it with a critical eye. It has great bones — high ceilings, huge windows, beautiful floors — and people compliment us on it every time they come in. It’s all I can do not to undercut their kind words by pointing out the things we haven’t yet fixed or improved — the dining room’s stained acoustic ceiling tiles (oy) or the pantry’s nasty lineoleum countertop or the bathroom’s…actually, the whole bathroom. (I could go on. And on.)
But every time we are driving home, whether from near or far, one of the girls announces when the house first comes into view. “There’s our house!” they chirp, and sure enough there it is, standing solidly, welcoming. Our children were both conceived here; they have spent their entire childhoods so far here. My mother’s upstairs apartment is a home within a home to her granddaughters. And I have recently noticed that this house has taken over my childhood home, where I spent my first eighteen years, as the stage of my dreams.
