A History in Houses

I’ve lived in nineteen houses, some beauties, some dumps. For example, when I was twenty-three I paid three hundred dollars a month to live in a closet with a slanted ceiling. My roommate’s cat would yowl through the hallways at night, especially on the nights she had a lover. I hung art. I made my bed. But the house had a shower that never seemed to drain, and after three months of going ankle deep in someone else’s murky water and plugging my ears over the sound of the cat, I moved out.

On the other hand, when I was twenty-four I lived in a house where I had a great big bedroom. I saw the seasons perform their tricks on the tree outside my window. Green to gold to white and then back to that meek kind of green that one day, out of nowhere, bursts with birds and life. In the mornings I would drink coffee with my roommate. Silly little pajamas, messy hair. We painted mugs at a pottery studio a few towns over, where you could get a plate of fries while you worked. Our mugs were flecked with salt. We were endlessly proud of them.

At twenty-five I lived in Ireland. It didn’t rain as much as you would think. At twenty-six I lived in a shotgun house where there were always cockroaches in the kitchen. I would take long borrowed bike rides through the neighborhood, cruising for unwanted furniture. Coffee tables, sauce pans. I furnished my apartment directly from the curb. Even the red patio chairs, which I propped up on the front porch beside the plants that wouldn’t grow in the Louisiana heat, came from someone else’s garbage. What I liked most about that house was my upstairs neighbor, who read palms and lent me her bike. She eventually left the neighborhood to have a baby, taking the charm with her, but not the bike.

The phases of my life ebbed and flowed from these nineteen houses. Each move meant the end of something—a bad roommate, a good view—but also the beginning. Isn’t it comforting to know that for every slanted ceiling there is a room with a big window? That no matter how bad things get, you may still emerge, boxes piled high in the trunk of your car, from one life into the next? I recently saw a picture of the coffee house. The new tenants were smiling from the big, white couch where we used to talk in our pajamas. They looked so young. I wanted to warn them against apartments with cockroaches and sidewalks with cracks. But if I’m an expert in anything, it’s that the lease will end. You will be both the taker of the red patio chairs and the one who leaves them behind. You will make it to house number nineteen and, because the tree outside your window has only just turned green, you will stay awhile.