just a house

I spent my first "night" here in early June, on the floor under the bay windows upstairs, freezing with only one down comforter and just a thin sheet between me and the freshly carpeted floor. We closed on this house in late May, two days later than we'd planned on, so we didn't even spend one night here before leaving on a three-week long vacation through Nevada and California. An extra day in San Francisco ensured that we'd have to marathon it back to Minnesota, where we arrived at our new home at 4:00 a.m., just wanting to collapse into bed. But there was no bed, no furniture at all, in fact. So we camped out under the curtain-less bay windows for two and a half hours, until I had to get up and go to work, where I promptly screwed up cefazolin and vancomycin IVs and generally tried to make my way through the day without killing anyone.

I remember sitting at Subway in Robbinsdale, poring over paint colors from the Sherwin Williams across the street, trying to decide between celery and celadon, and being so young and happy to be buying this house. We painted our bedroom light green (celery?), and the extra bedrooms yellow and blue. They are now known as the blue room and the yellow room. The downstairs bathroom is navy blue, and the paint is scratched off by the door....my dog Spiro clawed at it when he first came to live with us. There is a dent under the bay window in the living room where my other dog Oscar knocked a DVD player into the wall, and a big dent in the front door where a futon once fell down the stairs.

We frequented the unpainted furniture store when we first lived here. We were (mostly) done with cheap Target furniture, but real furniture was too expensive. Instead we bought relatively cheap, but beautiful, unfinished wood bookcases, tables, and even a desk. Our garage became a furniture-finishing studio, and now we have beautiful pieces, but if you look closely you can see inconsistencies in the desk and some drips down by the bottom of the bookcase. And if you were to look under our table you would see that it isn't finished on the underside, instead there are the barely legible words "Greg + Amanda," written by Stephanie and Miranda, two neighborhood girls, nine years old at the time, who saw us working on it out in the garage one autumn day and hung around to "help." I didn't finish over their work, thinking that maybe I would always like to remember that cool autumn day when the four of us worked on furniture and listened to the radio in the garage.

I always put marigolds out in little blue pots on the front porch railing, and hang the wildest-looking hanging basket I can find under the 779 in the spring. The porch is small, but just the right size for three chairs and maybe a dog bed for Schpeds. Oscar's chain is permanently attached to it, although I rarely bother to tie him up. There are a lot of snakes in the fall, but I don't really mind them. In fact, I'm kind of attached to them. The skinny tree out front has grown amazingly well these last few years, but you can still tell where part of it died during that first hard year. The silver maple across the street always has squirrels scampering through it. The very first day we lived here we stood upstairs by the bay windows and I looked out at that maple and declared that this was as good a view as any you could get living in the city. Every spring I sit out on the porch with my Osk and revel in the newly warm air, and read Barbara Kinsolver's "Small Wonder" and Anna Quindlen's essays, too. And I know that there is something beautiful and magic in that quiet neighborhood air, something that comes back every year.

We are arguing tonight, about the possibility of leaving this place, this life that has somehow become ours over the last five years. "I thought you were behind me on this," he says, and I am, but after eleven years he still doesn't understand that my heart loves best that which it can no longer have. And it's just a house, I know, but it's OUR house. You were the one who wanted a house in the first place, not me, and even though I cried for years when we drove past the old apartment, I grew to love this place, too. I look up and see the white hook in the ceiling....you hung it there as a surprise for me while I was at work so I would have a place for my absurdly huge bridal veil plant. And when I walked in I gawked, and you were so excited to surprise me, but I couldn't find the right words to say, and suddenly you knew that I hated it. I did hate it, but despite good intentions we never moved it, and now the plant has died and the hook just hangs there, empty. And I think if we were to leave I would miss looking up at it.

It's not just a house. It's a neighborhood, a dream, a piece of ourselves that isn't portable and never will be. It's who we were, and who we'll never be again. It's memories in every corner that will fade with time. It's the smell of the air in winter, in spring, and the feel of the concrete porch beneath our feet. The hook in the funny spot in the ceiling and the scratched out navy blue paint in the bathroom. The green carpet I picked out and the tan carpet we slept on that first night here. The yellow room and the blue room. Our room. Our life.