Life Would be Perfect If I Lived in that House

“Like a new lover, a new house opens a floodgate of anticipation and trepidation and terrifying expectations fused with dreamy distractions. It’s all encompassing and crazy making. You can’t concentrate at work. You space out while driving.” At least that’s how Meghan Baum feels about it. In her book, Live Would be Perfect if I Lived in that House, Baum details her lifelong search for the perfect house.
I can identify. Although I can’t match her 18 moves in 15 years, my focus has always been on houses. My count is 11 apartments or houses, not including three times I moved in with my parents (in three different houses) in the 20 years before I bought this house. Maybe I should have been the family architect. As B, the architect, pointed out to me after a trip to Taos many years ago, my photos were all of buildings, with no people in sight. So, I’m not exactly a people person. Big surprise.
Baum describes people as witnesses. “I wanted someone to see my home, admire it, admire me, and then leave.” A persistent Little House on the Prairie fantasy led her from Manhattan to a farmhouse in Nebraska, and then another.
My vision involved a small, vacant, run down, falling over barn in an empty field on the way to B and SL’s first house in Broomfield, a suburb north of Denver. I pictured it remodeled into a one-room-plus-sleeping loft house just right for me.
Besides a lust for houses, another thing I share with Baum is a recurring dream about finding forgotten rooms in a variety of houses or apartments my nocturnal fantasies designate as mine. Apparently, these dreams are fairly common and indicate a desire to move on or explore new opportunities.
Oddly, I haven’t had that dream since we started talking seriously about the Auntie Flat. Maybe my house fetish is fulfilled by the reality. I haven’t finished Baum’s book, so I don’t know if she finally found a house she could commit to. I hope so, but if not, plenty of people will attest to the charms of a nomadic life.

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