A house is like a home and a house houses

Scott and I have been looking for a house for a while, idly since a woman’s body was dumped behind our house a couple years ago, and actively since I stopped having to pay my student loans. The problem with Beckley, though, is there are total dumps for sale and then there are giant fancy houses for sale and there is hardly ever anything in between. So we just kept looking and looking and nothing was right.

A few years ago, I’d been trying to get my mom out here and she thought she would for a while but then she backed out. As an only child, and as a person who has a lot of shame over the things I put my parents through as a youth, I have guilt about my mom being so far away. Plus the worries of what am I going to do when/if her health gets worse?

And then in January my mom was like “Hey why don’t you go look at this house.” I guess her insurance is going up and up and she has to either be evacuated every few months or is under threat of being evacuated, because of fires, and had secretly decided it was finally time for her to leave California.

So Scott and I looked at the house and it was gorgeous and had all these little things that made it feel just right… you can walk to downtown, it’s five minutes from my job, it is a newer house (my mom’s preference) with antique details (my preference), the woman who owns it currently is a poet and a community college English professor, she had a bunch of issues of the New Ohio Review which is the first place where I was published in print, there is an antique bar in the basement that is from Baltimore (my mom is from Baltimore and her grandfather owned a bar), it has all the space we need, oh and there is a screened-in porch! and a big yard!

(Scott doesn't mind living with his mother-in-law. My mom is a very introvert-type person who likes to hide and listen to her headphones and you often don’t even know she’s there… plus he likes her, plus the house is giant.)

And then we made an offer, but there were multiple offers, but they picked ours! and then suddenly we were getting an inspection, and then we were getting a mortgage, and it all just felt like an insane whirlwind! buying a house is insane!

Now all the major roadblocks have been cleared and we still won’t close for 3 weeks but I get to dream about it and I am so so happy. It’s in a nice town, not Beckley, and the town is even smaller than Beckley but it’s cute and has like bougie restaurants and stuff.

It is weird to know we are saying goodbye to the little house we have lived in for a decade… it has only one tiny bathroom, and the tap water freaks me out because all this black sludge collects on the faucets, and our bedroom gets insanely cold in the winter and hot/humid in the summer, and now that the kids are older it’s too small for us… but this house has housed the happiest, best ten years of my life. And there are many things I love about it and will miss, like my woodpecker and robin friends, and our back deck overlooking all the trees, and our sunny kitchen, and our cozy living room, and knowing it was the place that birthed five books…

Also I wrote 3 poems about living in this house and they’re in the Rose Books reader, which you should preorder. The AI prompt at the bottom is based on a line from one of the poems.

Now we have arrived at the real purpose of me wanting to write this post. I wanted to make a list of scary things that have happened to us that have made me want to live in a different neighborhood, in order of scariest to most ordinary. (Our neighborhood is fine, but the neighborhood through the trees is not fine, and we’re also near the rail trail, which is basically an artery for drug dealers and crime.)

• Coming home one weekend and there is weird stuff on the ground in the hallway and we look up and there is a bullet hole in the doorway and a bullet hole through the window and the bullet was in the wall right next to the kids’ room. It was at my neck level and Iris’s head level and Sam’s heart level. (We called the cops. They did nothing)

• Woman’s body dumped in the woods behind our house after ODing; me watching the cops take out her body through my binoculars

• Drug dealer shootout behind the woods where three people died

• I was home alone and Jelly started barking and I told her to shut up but then I realized SOMEBODY WAS TRYING TO GET INTO OUR HOUSE and it was a very scary-looking woman and I screamed GET THE FUCK OFF MY PORCH (lol) and started beating my fists against the door like a psycho and she claimed she thought it was somebody else’s house (I called the cops because I didn’t want to be responsible for her breaking into one of my neighbor’s homes)

• Crazy man running out of the woods asking Scott to use his phone because somebody was trying to kill him (Scott did not let him use his phone but he did call the cops)

• Crazy man running out of the bushes while Sam and I were walking Jelly, screaming COMING OUT OF THE BOOSCHES (bushes)

• Waking up in the middle of the night, hearing what sounded like somebody trying to break in, thinking I was dreaming, but then asking Scott about it in the morning, and he heard the same thing, and yeah somebody was trying to break in.

• I was home alone and listening to podcasts about black-eyed children and freaking myself out and then I took Jelly to pee and there were scary people scoping out the house across the street and they told me DON’T CALL THE COPS and I wasn’t thinking about calling the cops until they told me that (I didn’t call the cops)

• Scary leprechaun-looking person trying to break into my car

• Man stealing mail off our porch

• Neighbor’s girlfriend using my cell to call the cops on her boyfriend, who had beat her up

• And then a couple nights ago a scary drug man pounded on our door very loudly at 7pm trying to get us to pay him to shovel snow

Feel like there’s probably more I am forgetting. My parents always wanted to live in “good neighborhoods” growing up and I hated the “good neighborhoods” and always elected to live in “bad neighborhoods,” and I discovered that in California, a “bad neighborhood” usually just means “not white” and they are perfectly safe, pleasant places to live. But Beckley is something else. The bad neighborhoods are actually bad and even the not-bad neighborhoods like ours are scary. This sheltered middle-class girl (me) learned a lesson about life!

I am kind of going to miss Beckley, though. It’s a charming, rough girl with a heart of gold.

Anyway! If you’re going to send me something, confirm my address before you do because we are moving soon! And if you’re my IRL friend, come stay with us because we’ll have a very nice guest area! like an entire side of the house where you can be comfortable and have privacy!