Home

We used to go for drives late at night. Before kids, before rising gas prices, before sleep deprivation was problematic - we used to go for drives. We wound around on back country roads in Central Texas. Armed with coffee and mix tapes, we whizzed through towns with names like Dime Box and Snook. Our entertainment was songs on the radio, counting dead armadillos, and conversations that meandered and turned back on themselves as much as the roads we traveled.

We made plans, we talked about movies I'd never seen but should have, we argued over music and made each other listen to our favorite songs and proclaim them the best ever. We met and married quickly, and while we knew the essential things about each other, we had a lot of getting to know each other to do. Those back roads are paved with countless stories and dreams that we mapped into the network of our lives together.


"One day I want to have a villa," he said. "With an atrium. Lots of skylights and a huge deck for grilling and eating outside."

"Definitely. Al fresco is the best-co," This is part of why he loves me. I say ridiculous things. "I want to have a room just for my creative stuff. A place where I have space to sit and sew or paint or make things and then places to put it all away when I'm done."

"That would be nice," he had been concerned when my boxes of journals and paints and fabric and odds and ends were moved into our tiny apartment a few months earlier. My obsession with Mod Podge was not something we had discussed before the wedding. You'd better not sit still, my dad had warned, you might get Mod-Podged.


"I want to have a place to entertain people. Where people can just drop in and we can eat together and just hang out."


"I want to have a good kitchen. Nothing fancy, just big enough and designed to really cook in."

"If and when we have kids, I want to design spaces for them that are all their own. To let them pick the colors and the themes and decorate their rooms however they want to."

"I want to have a yard and lots of trees. Space to garden and grow things, but also be close to an awesome city so we can walk to the library or to get coffee or dinner."



All those years ago, while we drank our gas station coffee out of styrofoam cups and drove long into the quiet Texas night, we thought we were just giving voice to wishes and dreams. We thought we wanted something impossible. We thought it would never actually be ours. At the time we lived in a dingy little apartment in a dingy little apartment complex in Bryan, Texas. It was a two bedroom box with a "one-butt" kitchen and ants in every room. We didn't notice.

It was extravagant because it had two bedrooms - we had a whole extra room for our desk and computer and all my assorted junk. Our brand new dishes fit just fine in the cupboards and our hand-me-down and thrift store furniture barely took up the space. We hung our posters and returned all of the fussy crystal and fine china that the old ladies had insisted on giving us for wedding presents. We stayed up late building a bookshelf for our newly combined libraries. We ate fast food and scrubbed floors and arranged and re-arranged furniture and cupboards. We were sweaty and tired and deliriously happy in that limbo time between the summer and the new semester, the vacation time from work. We were in our little planet of us, newly married, looking toward the future and finally home.

We have just completed our tenth move in fourteen years. We've gathered a few more things and people to ourselves in the intervening years. We've replaced the rickety, homemade bookshelf with a real one. We've long since lost the college futon that served as a couch. We've gained a thousand toys and books for small hands and little bright eyes. We still have our same dishes, less new now, but still much loved. Our library has swelled to the point where we no longer remember whose books are whose. They are just ours. We have moved this stuff so many times - into rental houses, old Victorians divided into apartments, high rises, crack neighborhoods, more dingy apartment complexes, my parents' upstairs, and condos. All of these places, we have called home, because home is where ever we are.

These past few weeks we have lain under the skylight in the living room and watched the clouds move across the moon and listened to the rain fall in our atrium. I have unloaded my knitting and sewing and writing and my Mod Podge into the cupboards that surround my built-in sewing table. We have had friends come by to help us move and wish us well. We have eaten on our back deck, straight from the grill to the picnic table. I have unpacked my same old dishes and sparse cooking implements in our light-filled kitchen with vaulted ceilings and a wall full of windows, a space to eat and wrap-around counters to work on. We have stayed up late painting bedrooms to the exacting specifications of monkeys with a vision and listening to them revel in their space - "It's so great, Mom. I couldn't even imagine it was this great. I want to stay here until I'm all grown up." We have planned our plantings for next year, tidied up the built-in planter boxes and then walked to the library and the hardware store for a break.

We have eaten fast food and stayed up way too late scrubbing floors and arranging, re-arranging furniture and cupboards. We are sweaty and tired and deliriously happy in that limbo time between the summer and the new school year, the vacation time from work. We are in our little planet of us, feeling like newlyweds, looking toward the future and finally home.