Dream House

I've lived in my house for almost seventeen years. We built this house as newlyweds and I've been stuck here ever since. I need to just face the fact that I'm never getting out of this house.

I should have known when I met Husband that he wasn't the kind of guy who moved around a lot. He was pretty settled in his own nice little house back then. The fact that it was in a neighborhood that was crumbling around him, with dangerous youth gangs roaming the streets, never fazed him. He wasn't the kind of guy who just up and moved. He had to think about it first for a few decades. Also, he came from a family who didn't like change either, like they'd nail a picture up on the wall in 1946 and that's where it would stay for the next sixty years.

Meanwhile, in my family, my mother spent the sixties repainting, recarpeting, refurbishing. If she ran out of money, she just picked up our furniture and threw it down, like dice, into a new decorating configuration. She could never leave anything alone, except permanent fixtures, like light switches and staircases.

I'm not saying my house isn't great, on the inside. Somehow, in 1993 when we bought it, before we even had kids, we ended up with a house with enough space. Nowadays we use a lot more of that space, but still, we're not squished.

But this great house is plopped on a postage stamp piece of property, and the house takes up most of it. If I reach an arm out the window, I can almost touch my neighbor's house. Our front yards are gravel, like the alleys were back in Chicago. In Arizona this is called "landscaping." Since grass doesn't grow naturally here, our backyard has a combination of dirt and weeds that we like to call a lawn.

So I stalk houses with land. I stalk houses with big kids' bedrooms. I stalk houses with views. I stalk houses in neighborhoods that don't have HOAs. I stalk houses with gigantic laundryrooms that don't have doors to the garage at one end of them. I could settle for a house that had a laundryroom that could actually fit a laundry basket in it.

For right now, I think I'll go rearrange some furniture.

Do you always feel like everything would be perfect if you lived in a different place? Do you live in different circumstances than those you grew up in?

Spooked

Last night was the end of us trick or treating in our neighborhood.

We've lived here a long, long time. As a matter of fact, when Husband and I moved in, childless, in October 1993 there were four occupied houses out of 89 in our subdivision. Of course, there were also about twenty under construction with dirt and nails everywhere, poured foundations, walls rising up built out of two by fours, and debris. It was like living in post-World War II Dresden. So that first year we thought, Only four people live here. Certainly it's safe not to buy candy. No one will come. Of course, the doorbell rang. The mean neighbors across the street showed up uttering the only words I ever heard them say to us in the fourteen years they lived there, "Trick or treat."

Even though I'm the child of two Holocaust Survivors and you'd think that pitch black nights and scary figures banging on doors with sudden demands would bring back bad memories for my parents, causing them to ban Halloween, it didn't. Not to mention the whole death thing. My parents made every decision based on "What are the Americans doing?" So, if the Americans were dressing their children up as ghouls and sending them out begging, that's what we did. Also, it didn't cost any money. To get a costume I was basically sent into my older sisters' room to find one - which meant every year I was a hippy. Also, we came home with this free food as a result of this bewildering panhandling, a definite bonus in Mom's eyes.

Last night our neighborhood was a ghost town, and I don't mean a fun, Halloween ghost town. So we ditched it for a different neighborhood nearby, becoming Halloween crashers. There we found the motherlode: roving bands of kids, dressed up adults, parties in the driveways, hay-filled wagons set up to take kids from one block to another, decorated houses, even cauldrons boiling over with dry ice "smoke." A firetruck came by with all of its lights on and the firefighters came out and passed out candy.

Bar Mitzvahzilla and his friend, on their last Halloween before high school, found a house that was giving out whole candy bars and couldn't help themselves, they had to go there over and over again until the homeowner sent them away. Inbred chutzpah. Daughter, who has a short fuse for just about anything, had finished earlier, but once she saw that whole candy bar, that was it for her. She walked up to the door of the house in a trance, cupped her hand for the candy - she was so sure she was done she hadn't even brought a bag along - and came running back, clutching the candy bar like gold.

And then it was done and the lights went out one by one, the legend of the whole chocolate bar living on forever.

Home Sweet Home

This is our neighborhood: we're trapped in a subdivision of three streets and we live on the middle one. The houses, though not completely identical, are pretty much identical. You'd have to live here to be able to tell the minute differences between one exterior elevation and another. Let's just say that there's a lot of stucco and mission tile roofs, Mesquite trees and gravel front yards.

One of the reasons why the houses look the same is because we have an approved color palette for our exteriors and we aren't allowed to change anything without submitting it to the architectural board. Even, like, if we wanted to switch from grass to gravel. I know I'm supposed to be very reassured by this firm control - after all, no one can suddenly come along and paint their house flamingo pink. But we can't even have a garage door different from the others, and they're starting to look dated, like we're a time capsule from 1993. I'm all for historical accuracy, I'm just not sure about anachronism.

Since we live in Arizona, I have neighbors I've never met. For some reason - the heat maybe? - people don't leave their houses here, they hide inside, or they open their garage, hop in their car and drive away. Kids don't play outside because of those gravel front yards and because every one of them goes to a different school and they don't know each other. Anyway, with lots as small as ours, a good neighbor is always a quiet neighbor, and a good neighbor driver is the one who doesn't try to run over my kids if they do wander outside.

Our neighborhood is also gated, which means that everytime I try to get in here the gate malfunctions in some way and starts slamming shut on my car. Sometimes the gates break on both ends - the in and the out - and I'm trapped in here like a jail cell. The gates weren't original to our neighborhood, rather they were voted in and not by us, because we're Democrats and don't believe in such exclusionary nonsense. Cars get stuck trying to get in or out of the gates or they just lurk around a while and get in following someone else. After all, these are not security gates; they're just for show. And they're only supposed to show the world that we're richer than everyone outside the gates.

But the neighborhood looks good - it's very neat. It has to be. About once a week a tiny white pickup truck from the Homeowner's Police drives through here with a guy inside holding a clip board. He stops in front of each house, carefully examining our home for any infractions of our HOA rules, like leaves left in our gravel front yards or garbage cans left out on non-garbage days. Within a few days we'll have a letter titled "Friendly Reminder," which is not friendly nor is it a reminder, it's a violation notice. I head outside to rake, I haul in errant garbage cans.

It's Arizona, it's our house, and we've been living here for 16 years.