I'm contemplating buying a new house.

We've been out of our original home since October 10, 2019, due to a fire. It feels reasonable to want to move back into a permanent home. Where I can open storage boxes and dump all their contents onto tables and couches without losing stuff. Where I can locate a flathead screwdriver, a utility knife, or any array of rulers and triangles or levelers or other tools I took for granted. Where I can remember exactly where I hung my favorite ballcap.

Coming up on seven years, I've often enough described myself as being "homeless." The quip -- though my tragedy doesn't go so low -- is nevertheless what I am in truth. Not quite stranded on sidewalks: the laundry gets folded in unfamiliar rooms; the children's photos are with us but have no hooks to hang them; Sunday family-home-dinners are gatherings at restaurants;  the neighborhood community center where I'm supposed to vote I have to google for directions; preparing for next season by planting perennials, don't even think about.

The legacy I want to pass down is not in the house, anyway.

Nevertheless, my library consists of books in boxes underneath boxes of books. I have had to toss as many as I've kept. Instead of hauling around thirty boxes, just ten or eleven. My leather hobby consists of a square on a desk amidst squares of stuff. I'd like to do more but lack of a workshop table. Leather work entertains me for hours in the creative, focused, numb-to-the-world zone. Such a hobby needs a home-zone.

​Chill in this space with me for sec. Hiding the hobby atmosphere becomes art form. Hiding the library becomes an uncover. Those with hobbies know the meaning of a quiet safe lone table and a solid wood stained chair. It could be marked up, chipped, decades old, used. It may smell of glues and crafts and adventures that glisten in the chamber room. That's its charm.

Those with libraries know of the sitting chairs that don't hurt your back. The shelf the treasured books sit on. The coffee that started hot and went cold as novel pages turned on their own. The pages that went unfinished.

A home is meant for that. A house owned and operated by myself, where I can place, no, where I can nail the hand-carved brother-in-law-oiled-and-painted sign: "Harnett" to the siding on the front porch. A sign of ownership. A sign of longevity, if not levity. It is the meaning of happiness.

I'm convinced to buy a new house, because after seven years where we had no arguments bigger than the space of my favorite coffee cup that I insisted go into the strange cupboard, where nothing boiled over and stained the stove, where every dissension evaporated by early evening.

During these past seven years, no rafters in the ceiling could hold a sentiment. 

Home is really more than a house. Though a house I miss.


June 5, 2026   9:25 AM