How To Feel At Home

Searching for a house in 2019 meant confronting my lifelong alienation from this country. Buying one felt like betting on this country, and me.

The house that got away, but began the dream of owning a house.

Four years ago, I moved north from New York City to Bradford, VT. I’d taken a job at Dartmouth College, and I needed to travel back and forth from New York to wherever I was teaching writing less than I had been — working outside of New York to be able to afford your life in New York had become an untenable, unhappy-making proposition. So I took an apartment in Bradford while I searched and got to know the surrounding towns.

I soon found a dream house, a house that will most likely turn into a story one day, as I spent so much time imagining a life inside of it.

It was not so much a dream house as a dream compound.

The real estate you find in Vermont is a mix of homes built sometime over the last 300 years that have either been well-maintained or not, either as vacation homes, or farm houses, or suburban homes, and there’s a little too much of that sort of bland new home with the architectural idiom of a Holiday Inn Express in Phoenix. But there’s also a certain kind of home you find with some regularity…