3.24 p.m. Â Saturday, January 6, 2013
Today I drove past the house my parents almost bought when we moved to Johnson City. Â I'm every bit as enchanted by it now as I was when I first saw it. Â Big and plain, whitewashed bricks concealing a simple interior. Â We called it "the French house" because the people selling it were French. Â It was easy to look at their things resting in the house and become excited about living there, because their belongings had the same indifferent confidence as their home. Â But our things would have been bumbly and awkward in their places, as my parents said; that much was true. Â So, I suppose, was the fact that had my parents bought the house, we would have been "house poor." Â I always thought it would have been worth it, to live in this unpretentious white house that meekly hid exciting things like compact closets that rolled out into the room on tracks and an island of cupboards and cabinets that shielded the private rooms upstairs from the curiosity of guests who might venture up the old, richly brown staircase, with its smoothly curving handrail, a stark blip of dark in the white house.
(I could draw that handrail. Â And I didn't even know to pay attention to handrails back then. Â It was a good handrail.)
Now, from the street, most of the house is hidden by a cool gray fence encircling the property. Â Whereas when we first visited it, I became excited in my chest at the prospect of a few years spent in its bright hallways, now, a dulled remnant of that first excitement simmers in the pit of my stomach as I consider what life in Johnson City might have been had we lived here, rather than in a house exiled to a half-acre lot in a suburban neighborhood governed by a Homeowners' Association. Â Quiet, yes, peaceful, yes, but any connection to the "urban" center of the town is only accomplished by passing through an arterial gamut of strip malls and restaurants, sprawling, drenched in asphalt.
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