Just like everyone else

My husband and I bought a house. (Hence the hiatus in blogging.)

In general, it's been a nerve wracking experience. We’ve been renting apartments since college so we haven’t had to fix a faucet, mow a lawn or paint a wall in a very, VERY long time. It’s been a scary process - there’s so much to learn. We’ve had to learn about mortgages, taxes, septic systems, and home-owners insurance. They all seemed like stressful, grown-up things. What if you get them wrong? What if you make the wrong decisions? It was a lot to think about. It’s almost so much that some days, I didn't want to bother. I just wanted to curl up and stay in an apartment forever.

But, everyday, for some unknown reason, I didn't give up. I keep searching online for the best house. I kept driving around neighborhoods and talking to friends and going over our budget. At night, when I should've been sleeping, I thought about gardens and curtains and all things I needed to learn about. But something, some deep-seeded drive, kept pushing me to become a homeowner. I think that there’s a part of me that saw buying my first home as a rite of passage. It’s seemed like a necessary step to becoming a full-fledged adult - and I was curious to see what THAT was like.

And so we found a house - and fell in love. It's a beautiful house in a beautiful place. It's way better than we ever thought we'd have. It's like someone decided to make the perfect house, then put it on the market, and waited almost a year until we came to find it.

So we're learning - what it's like to be a homeowner, a member of a town. I keep wondering - will we develop a kinship with the people who have lived in this house over the last 150 years, with the people down the street? We’ll get to go to town hall meetings and decide if our tax dollars will pay for that addition to the library. We’ll get to rake leaves and plow our driveway and buy appliances and do all those things that everyone else does. Everyone else.

Today we bought mulch. It was wonderful.