1. How many houses/apartments have you lived in throughout your life?
Not all that many, considering my age and the general rootlessness of society today.
- The House I Grew Up In. It still stands in Comanche, Texas, and my mother still lives in it. It’s a very straightforward Folk Victorian/Colonial Revival Transitional, built in 1903.
- The Boarding House. I had a room—the only single in the house—on the third floor of a boarding house, a converted Arts and Crafts monster (probably about 1915 to 1920) just west of the University of Texas campus. It’s still there, still looks much as it did (from the outside, anyhow), and is now a student co-op.
- The Apartment on the Corner. The summer I was a sophomore, I moved to this tiny 1960s-built efficiency apartment on the corner of 45th Street and Speedway, at the northern edge of the original Hyde Park neighborhood. It was very convenient to the campus, since the shuttle buses stopped directly across the street from my door. I first fell in love with Hyde Park while I lived here, and I stayed for six years and a half. I only left when I went into
- The First Exile. L and I moved in together, to save money against our wedding. The apartment was in a group of one-story fourplexes (not necessarily bad of itself), but it sat in a boring postwar neighborhood and was much too far away from the center of town for my liking. We stayed there until we were ready to begin a family, and needed an apartment with a second bedroom. What we ended up with was
- The Second Exile. This place was in a neighborhood that decayed toward a drug-dealers’ war zone while we lived there. Its one good point was a HUGE kitchen/dining room combination, the only time since childhood I’d had a kitchen that was almost big enough. (Kitchens are never big enough, no matter what. Parkinson’s Law always takes effect at once within a kitchen.) T was born while we lived there, and we stayed until she was not-quite-four.
- The First Return. A friend-of-a-friend was getting married and needed someone to take up the lease on her two-bedroom prewar cottage in the Rosedale neighborhood. It was a house and not another apartment, the neighborhood far better, and the rent was less than what we’d been paying at The Second Exile, so we snapped it up. We came to find out that we had leased a Dump with a Great Address. Our landlord was a car dealer who’d bought our whole half-block of houses, intending to tear them down and build medical office condominia—but that was before the neighborhood association fought him to a standstill before City Council, and he couldn’t get the zoning. Shortly after that the late-Eighties Crash came along and nobody at all would pay a million dollars for seven tiny prewar houses on lots with single-family zoning that couldn’t be changed. So he rented them for next to nothing, gave a retired couple the job of managing them for their supplemental income, and did the minimum of maintenance possible to keep them habitable and rentable. We fought mildew, cockroaches, and silverfish continually (the roaches and silverfish ate my good silk opera hat), the only heat came from open-flame space heaters (very, very illegal in town), and a single window unit in the living room provided the only air conditioning. Many nights I slept on the sofa because it was the only place in the house cool enough that I could sleep.
However, it was also a Neat Place to Live. Our neighbors were generally peaceful and nice ones, we were Back In Civilization (i.e., south of 45th Street), and The Legendary Central Market was built within walking distance of our house while we lived there. One of the residents on the opposite side of the street had several sons who were in the police and fire departments, so regular patrols “to check on Mama” kept the bad guys going someplace else.
Our directly-opposite neighbor turned out to be the most interesting of the bunch: legendary underground cartoonist and grassroots historian Jaxon. His son and T were playmates throughout elementary school, and our families still keep in touch. Even my mother approved of Jack, because they shared an interest in Texas history.
Still, everything ends . . . the husband of the elderly couple who’d been the property managers died, and the landlord found a development company who wanted to buy and gentrify our block. The new owners evicted everyone by the simple tactic of raising rents to close to market (we had been paying half of market, or perhaps less). L and I knew we were each about to inherit some money, but we hadn’t quite and hence couldn’t yet think of buying a house, so we went back into
- The Third Exile, a smallish 1950s brick duplex half a block from The First Exile. It served only as a mark-time residence for a year, while we waited for the estates to be liquidated. It wasn’t an unpleasant place to live, the more so since it had just been renovated, but it was . . . characterless. So finally, L and I received our inheritance checks, we went to the credit union and arranged a mortgage, and bought
- Our House, where we live today. It’s in the northern annex to Hyde Park, and five blocks from The Apartment on the Corner. Barring accident or catastrophe, I expect it’s the last house we’ll ever live in.
2. Which was your favorite and why?
Our House would have to be favorite, because it’s ours, but The First Return comes second. And if you can’t tell why I think that, you didn’t read the first answer closely enough.
3. Do you find moving house more exciting or stressful?
Definitely more stressful. I get upset very easily by disorder and clutter. L has found that, when trying to move house with me, it’s best to move things in instalments over a month’s time, packing some boxes, moving them over, unpacking and setting up what we moved, and repeating the process until we’re done.
4. What’s more important, location or price?
Location, certainly. If price had been a first consideration, we wouldn’t be living where we are; we’d be in some just-built, faceless subdivision with a lower mortgage payment.
5. What features does your dream house have (pool, spa bath, big yard, etc.)?
See my prize-winning essay on My Dream House for the answer to that one.
The Cat Who Walks Through Walls is amiable. Fnord.
