Values and House Dreams

I have imagined the house and yard that I want for a very long time. When I was 12, my best friend loved fashion and wedding magazines, and she would spend hours poring over the pictures to plan her dream wedding. I preferred to read books about architecture and landscaping, watching This Old House and The Victory Garden on PBS with my parents on the weekends (back in the days of single TV homes and no internet or cable, unimaginable to many people now). I learned about woodworking and gardening, how to transplant trees and replace old plumbing, and that plants and animals require different care as the seasons change. I grew up in a rural area, where we were far more connected to nature. We had the beach right down the street, where people fished, shrimped, put out crab traps. Our grandfather went hunting every year, bringing home venison that lasted for months. Most of the other kids participated in 4H, the local agricultural club, by raising a pig, lamb, or rabbits for show awards at the rodeo and eventual slaughter and meals for the family. The life cycle from which so many urban dwellers are severed was actively playing out all around us, and it felt vital and necessary.

But I didn’t just want a slice of nature like the rural community around me, I wanted it to be beautiful. I wanted the open, brightly lit rooms that I saw in Martha Stewart Living magazines to be in my future house. I wanted the neatly landscaped gardens that were toured on The Victory Garden, the gracefully aging hosts traveling the world for the love of plants. I spent a lot of time thinking about it, when I wasn’t imagining myself living in Hobbiton. 

I may have somewhat lost sight of that early passion as I grew into adulthood, because I got caught in the business of being adult. But those old memories came back to me yesterday, when I asked myself one question: “What are my values?”

As we started house hunting recently, we thought at first that our priorities were all about space. We wanted the biggest house that we could afford, and we wanted it to be in great shape. Yesterday, as we were considering putting in an offer on a house in a newer development down the street, we circled back around to a discussion of how we actually want to live versus the kind of life certain houses require. Because beyond all the practical things that a house determines, like how many people can comfortably live there or how much stuff we can store, I realized that the design and layout of a house and its yard to some degree determine the kind of life you can live.

Let's look at the life in a new development home:

• We will have an HOA already deciding how our yard needs to look, where we can park, whether we can have animals in the backyard (no chicken coop), even if we can hang up a damn clothesline! I imagine some woman trying to look upper class saying, "we want to be environmentally friendly." Friendly means buying organic dryer sheets, a meaningless label on an unnecessary product, not eliminating the need for one of the most energy demanding appliances in the home. We're not peasants.
• We will have no trees, or they will be either very small or slow growing oaks. Usually both. There are lots of beautiful trees that don’t require 20 years to look nice, y’all! They even bloom sometimes and offer actual privacy from your neighbors that are only 10-20 feet away.
• Our neighbors would be very close to us, whether we like them or not. Especially in our price range, the lots in new development neighborhoods tend to be small. 
• And the competition is fierce to get these homes! Every house we’ve looked at has multiple offers, with individuals elbowing their way to the top for overvalued prices on builder grade materials, houses with no personality, and backyards suffering from far too much sun exposure. No trees, no landscaping! Why even buy a house if you never go outside?

Then we look just a bit farther out, and we find older construction homes in need of updating, but they have a variety of beautiful, mature trees and large backyards. They have actual porches! There’s no light pollution or incredibly close neighbors. There are farms next door, cows in neighboring pastures, historic town squares, and traditional Texas BBQ down the street. That feels like home to me.

Most importantly, there’s nobody who gives a shit about whether I build a chicken coop, fill the front yard with vegetables, hang my clothes up on a line, or install gutters with a water reclamation system or solar panels. I could landscape with local drought-resistant wildflowers and plants, separate beds with recycled glass or stone, eventually lose the lawn and live without a mower. We would just have to drive a little bit further.

I sat on our back porch last night and listened to the city. In the neighborhood we’re living in currently, sirens are constantly going by, neighbors barbecue 3 or 4 nights a week, and children play unattended without anyone even thinking about calling the cops to report it (all children are “free range” children). Noise is constant. This kind of community won't last. Gentrification is coming, but it’s not yet there. We see it encroaching, less well off families losing their homes to foreclosure in the face of a rising tide of property taxes and living costs. Soon the neighborhood will consist of the older people who are barely hanging on, and young professionals buying overpriced, remodeled homes that will likely have the same fatal foundation problems our rental does. I thought about all of that, and listened.

And then I thought, if we bought just a bit further out in the country, all I would hear right now is the wind in the fields.