5: How to Dream Yourself a Different Life

Some people will never understand. Don't try to make them. They're content making lifetime commitments to their homes. Loyalists. They move somewhere and there they stay until they die. There's nothing wrong with it. It's a skill, or an art really, to be content with just what you have. To never see yourself somewhere else and be reflected in someone else's window.

But if you're not that type, don't feel too bad. There are others like you out there. The ones who are never quite happy exactly where they are. The ones who are always dreaming of somewhere...else.

You read the real estate section of your paper religiously like some people have their morning coffee or check their e-mail. You scan the "for sale" signs as you drive down the streets of your city, almost by instinct. You know which ones are new and which ones are the orphans, sitting on the market for ages and no one ever comes to get them. The agents recognize you at the open houses. "Oh, hello," they say opening up the doors, smells of freshly baked cookies wafting through the air. "It's you again," with a gloomy edge in their voices. The looky loo back for another go see. Always a bridesmaid and never a bride.

Some people, they see the flaws in a house. They see where the carpet is worn, where the cat peed on it and the kid drew on it with permanent marker. They see the broken handrail and someone's botched attempt to glue it back together right but it's just a bit off enough to make you uncomfortable in some weird little way. They see where a tile's come loose. Where it's fashionable to have granite and there's only corian instead. Where there is certainly a lot of grass and isn't that going to be an awful lot of upkeep.

Some people, they see the flaws in a house. But you. Where they see flaws, you see possibilities. You'll replace the carpet with that thick brown berber that you saw at Home Depot last week. Handrails are old fashioned anyway. Take them down and go modern! Tile and granite are both out. Put in stained concrete instead. And who mows her own grass anyway? Isn't that what a husband is for?

In every house you look at, there exists the possibility of a different life. Perhaps the perfect life of catalogs where you magically grow five inches in height and shrink five inches around the waist. Where your children will all be sun kissed blondes and obedient to boot and your husband never works but instead you sail on your lake (what lake?) in your yacht and eat delicious calorie free tea sandwiches (that you didn't have to make) in your backyard at a bugfree picnic.



At each house there is that moment where that possibility exists. Before you tally up all your possibilities and see that they will take you for a ride to the poorhouse, that this school district is terrible, that there is no working AC in the house and it climbs into the upper 90s in the summer and you will fry there in that house while all your dreams sizzle around you like a grease fire. Before all that reality hurls you back down to the grubby old earth you can imagine that life could be purely magical in a different place and a different time between these walls and these windows and this front door.

If you could just live here, it might all be so.

Try this at home:
If you could live a different life, what would that life look like?