Seven years on Vermont Avenue

Danny Reardon has lived in this house for nineteen months and has already changed more of it than I have in seven years, which is because we rented the one on Haywood for five of those and I was not going to put money into somebody else's gutters. Vermont Avenue. 1940s, two bedrooms, a deep porch, a yard that runs down to a fence that we built in a weekend in April. There is a crack in the kitchen floor that runs from the door to the stove and the inspector was unbothered by it and I think about it weekly. We bought it last spring with everything we had, which was less than we would have liked because of the year before that, and the rate is not good, and I am aware I have never once written that down in here. It is the first thing either of us has owned. I stood in the yard tonight waiting for the dog to come in and looked back at it with the kitchen light on, and had the specific feeling you get about a house you are going to be sad to leave, which is a strange thing to feel about somewhere you have lived nineteen months and are not leaving. Unless we do. Which is now a sentence that exists.