Once that’s done we’ll have to repaint the cathedral ceiling in the living room where there’s water damage. That’s annoying because we just painted the entire room ten months ago when we first moved in.

And our pool needs resurfacing.

We negotiated a credit for half of that cost after the inspection but we spent that money on repairs that weren’t disclosed or caught in the inspection: fixing the sewer line and waterproofing a “finished” room in the basement.

Though we’ve had WAY more repairs than anticipated in our first year living in our “new” home, we’re happy here.

Each new obstacle brings frustration but also offers us another chance to put our stamp on the forever home we’re creating for our family.

So we didn’t get a turn-key ready home: there are worse things.

If my kids are going to realize the kind of future I hope for them with the sort of values I’ll instill in them, we’ll have to work at it. Sometimes together, other times alone, but always in tandem for the good of the household.

My whole mentality changed once we decided this was our “forever home.” We moved in planning to spend significant time and resources redesigning things and knowing it would be a decades-long process to make this the home we know it can be.

Despite its flaws, it’s clear this house has been well-loved by several generations before us.

Incredible thought was put into both the original design and the addition, as well as the landscaping, drainage, and outdoor entertainment spaces.

Clearly, some mistakes were also made and some other things just no longer fit the needs of a modern family. Like the 8-track player built into my basement wall.

For now, our visitors can appreciate the beauty of a few select rooms we’ve updated and then magically transport themselves back 40 years simply by walking into any bathroom.

Why do I own a brown bathtub and oddly contoured toilet? Nobody knows.

It’s like seeing a pay phone on the side of the road. We know WHY it was put there but it’s surprising that it’s STILL there.

I’m not accountable for the decisions the previous owners made but I’m definitely responsible for what happens going forward and we’re tackling each obstacle head on as our resources allow.

It’s easy to get discouraged when things go wrong (and it absolutely isn’t your fault) but I refuse to let negativity and cynicism become defining characteristics of my children’s childhoods.

By moving into a house that clearly needs work while bringing two kids into a world that clearly needs work, my wife and I are the living embodiment of the poem Good Bones by Maggie Smith, which reads in part:

Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the state of our home lately. Not just our new house but our town, our state, our country, and world.

It’s hard not to when the summer of hope so clearly boomeranged back towards despair.

We’ve been defeated in Afghanistan. Hospitals in some of our major cities are rationing care. California is burning. Soldiers’ families are grieving. Authoritarianism is on the rise.

So we didn’t get a turn-key ready world: there are worse things.

I refuse to let negativity and cynicism become defining characteristics of my children’s childhoods.

That’s why, after 11 blissful years out of local politics, I’ve stepped back in as a candidate for the Board of Education. It wasn’t an easy decision to make due to the highly-charged issues that lay ahead in this deeply divided time.

If our kids are going to realize the kind of future we hope for them, we’ll have to work at it. Sometimes together, other times alone, but always in tandem for the good of us all.

It’s going to take a lot of work, but our kids need a home. Luckily, we have one with good bones.

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At this point we’ve survived small gatherings, family swims, and a blowout party without any major incidents so something’s going right.

We don’t yet have the stereotypical lifesaver on a rope hanging on the pool house wall but we’ve got a first aid kit with a lifeguard cross on the cover, a freezer full of freeze pops, and a counter full of sunblock.

I didn’t know how I’d take to the pool-owner lifestyle. Luckily, it suits me.

There are worse ways to spend an evening than by quietly skimming beetles and (pine) needles outside.

It’s fun having a collection of tools that fit on the end of a long stick and operating the filter gives me a simple-machine thrill.

Any day where I turn levers and meaninglessly tap on gauges is a good day.

I’m not particularly good at getting the vacuum hooked up (there’s a whole thing about drowning the hose to get all the air out of the system) but once it’s operational I love slowly moving the vacuum head across the pool’s bottom.

It feels like I’m painting the floor clean.

I have a hard-bristled brush for getting sediment off the corners, which is a bit of work but makes such a big difference that it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.

Really, I’ve just mixed the grit back into the water but sometimes the illusion of progress is all you need.

I run the filter overnight and hope to wake up to sparkling clean water which, on the rare night (lately) when it doesn’t rain, usually works.

The chemicals are a struggle for me.

I learned the hard way not to bring clothes or towels I care about anywhere near chlorine. Each granule is a tiny bleach bomb waiting to streak my fabrics pink.

I had planned to dip my toe into pool chemical shopping but an intense round of “chlorine tablet shortage” news stories shoved me into the deep end early in the season – before we’d even uncovered the pool.

Local news beat everyone over the head with a “chlorine tablet shortage” story fifteen times in one morning so the rush that could’ve been spread out over a month all got concentrated into one stock-clearing day.

After learning which chemicals I’d need, I headed out to get just enough chlorine tablets to last me through the season.

I’ve always been intimidated by pool supply stores like Namco and Leslie’s Pools.

Buying buckets of expensive highly-toxic chemicals is intimidating in its own right but especially when you’ve never done it before and morning news anchor voices keep reverberating in your head saying, “pool owners may be in for a ‘shock’ as the chlorine shortage is sure to ‘sting.’”

I confirmed with a store employee that I was buying the right products but it was pretty clear that the pallet being stripped bare in front of my eyes was probably the one with the item everyone wanted.

One guy pushing two shopping carts felt compelled to tell me that he had two pools.

I wanted to respond, “Two pools!? What do you train seals?” But, instead I said, “Smart!”, which didn’t make any sense but seemed to make him feel better.

It was a surge of desperation I hadn’t seen since Covid’s early days and I resented being a part of it without even knowing if I needed to be (so far as I can tell tablets are still available but they’ve since doubled in price).

Fear seems to be a big motivator within the pool community.

I’m constantly mailed catalogs claiming to remove all my algae and get my water’s PH under control but it’s all too much.

I’m not sure what “algaecide” is, but I’m pretty Saddam Hussein was guilty of it.

I stick to an old-school regimen of chlorine and vigorous filtration.

It’s amazing what you find in your filter basket, especially after a hard rainfall.

The strangest thing I’ve found in my pool’s filter basket is a gun.

A squirt gun, to be clear, but still a big surprise.

It’s far from the worst thing I could’ve found after hosting three pre-teen boys especially considering that their favorite part of the pool wasn’t the water slide but rather the moths who were attracted to the light inside the pool at night and followed it to a watery grave.

Maybe I’m doing too much skimming after all.

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If you include all of the ones I’ve gotten estimates from, it’s gotta be well over one hundred.

“Oh, you must work in real estate or construction,” the casual reader might think, but no.

So why have I dealt with a small army of tradesmen? (Sorry PC Police, they’ve ALL been men).

Because my wife and I thought the perfect compliment to a pandemic pregnancy was to buy and restore a “well-loved” house.

And, since we don’t have a reality show on HGTV, that also meant staging and selling the first house we owned.

Once you account for landscaping, painting, HVAC, home inspections, radon remediation, and a host of other obstacles (both foreseen and unforeseen) in two different housing markets, the number of contractors quickly climbs.

Home repairmen have become like family to me: I get nauseous when they call, I won’t trust them with a copy of my house key, and I avoid them around the holidays.

I used to be intimidated interacting with tradesmen as if it somehow reflected poorly on my masculinity not to have a complete understanding of the parts and components of my heating system but I’ve gotten over that and am now pretty adept at striking up a rapport with them.

Namely, by not using expressions like, “striking up a rapport” with them.

It’s important to have a good relationship with anyone who’s working on your home.

Not only are you almost entirely at their mercy once a project starts, but they’ve seen the corners of your life nobody else has seen unearthing the mysteries behind your drywall or venturing into the recesses of your attics and crawl spaces.

So how should you go about building this billed-by-the-hour camaraderie? By following these simple tips:

Talk about the route they took to get here.

Once they tell you, either show shared gratitude that they didn’t have to travel too far or express amazement at how far they’ve traveled and compliment them for their versatile knowledge of local geography.

Never, EVER, ask if they had trouble finding the place. Tradesmen pride themselves on always knowing where they are even though they’re totally dependent on GPS like all of us.

Accept their view of the world.

Never look down your nose at a man who’s willing to look down the manhole of your septic tank.

Do you want to know his opinion on taxes, politics, or whether kids today just need a good ass whooping? Of course not, but you’re likely to hear about it.

There’s no sense in challenging him or looking to pick a fight.

Just be grateful that he’s sticking to those subjects and not going on in great detail about the mess he just spent an hour sucking out of your yard with a hose.

Extra points for beating him to the point by vaguely referencing how things have changed and including a note of ominousness in your tone.

Blame everything on the previous homeowner.

It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with plumbing, electric, drywall, or HVAC, your repairman will at some point find fault with the way something in your house is set up.

This may be something that’s your fault or it may be something you’ve never even noticed but either way just immediately blame the previous homeowner.

Not only does this let your tradesman elevate himself by ranting about the “idiot who set this up in the first place,” but it also places you in the same elevated moral position.

Though you might be saying, “the last guy who owned this was kind of weird,” what they’re hearing is, “those people didn’t maintain things to the standards you and I share.”

Even when you’ve never heard of that standard before.

Always hint at a bigger project to come.

Of course, not everyone is just looking to help you fix your current problem as cheaply and practically as possible. Some are just looking to find a helpless homeowner and take him for all he’s worth *cough cough* Roto-Rooter *cough cough*

Keep these vultures at bay by always alluding to a bigger job off in the unsubstantiated future.

My electrician has given me an estimate for a whole-house generator. My plumber has offered referrals for bathroom remodels. I asked my drywall guy about the best time of year for him to possibly re-stain and seal our wooden deck.

The hope is that the appeal of possibly getting a bigger job down the road outweighs any inclination towards taking shortcuts or overcharging me on the current job. I don’t know if it works but it feels like it does.

Learn as much as you can from them.

Most of these guys are lone gunslingers riding into town at the first sign of trouble and leaving as soon as the dust settles.

They usually don’t have many (if any) coworkers and are eager to share some of the knowledge they’ve accumulated year after year from providing the same specialized care.

Some of my favorite questions are: “how much longer do you think I can get out of that system?” And, “for long-term budgeting purposes what would a full replacement or catastrophic failure look like?”

Everything you have is going to break at some point. When it does, you might need someone you can trust to help bail you out.

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This is especially challenging for me this year because it is my first spring in a new house.

New things are constantly popping out of the ground and I have no idea which ones are purposeful and which ones are working to suffocate the flowers and plants we actually want.

We moved into the house at the end of September, long after the flower-growing season had passed so every new shoot and bud is a true surprise.

Previous homeowners put considerable thought into my landscaping, which creates a lovely setting I am utterly unqualified to maintain.

My landscaping approach at our first home was less like Edward Scissorhands and more like Freddie Krueger. I wielded my weed whacker as a weapon of mass destruction eviscerating anything that wasn’t grass, a tree, or a hydrangea bush.

I’m going for a more delicate approach at this house, which has me surveying the garden beds with the urgency of a post-9/11 homeland security officer suspecting everyone as being part of a sleeper cell.

Since I’m deep over my head, I’m using professional help with a plant-identification app on my phone.

I snap a picture and wham, the app tells me what I’m looking at and how to care for it. But what I really need it to tell me is which plants to keep and which ones to remove.

Aesthetics, I’ve learned, aren’t the only thing that go into a well-thought out yard. For instance, my dwarf honeysuckle shrubs were likely planted to attract pollinators and bring vigor to the garden.

I hadn’t once considered my garden’s vigor prior to reading that sentence. Now it’s practically all I think about.

What a complicated world I unlocked.

I go back and forth between having great reverence for the original landscape design and hating the owners for the unnecessary pretension of it all.

And I fully recognize the absurdity of being a guy who’s struggling to grow grass on one end of the property while also caring for a set of Chinese Peony’s on the other end and nursing a Bearded Iris in the middle.

I don’t know what a Bearded Iris is and I’m literally reading the thing that tells me what a Bearded Iris is while I’m writing this sentence.

The app has a strange habit of making pleasant things sound mundane and mundane things sound beautiful.

I was charmed by the description of my Narrowleaf Bittercress until halfway through when the app labeled it a “noxious weed” capable of “large scale infestation.” Talk about burying the lede.

Then there are the easy decisions like removing a giant bush that was blocking part of our reservoir view. The landscaper we hired to remove it said, “in about a month that plant will bloom beautiful flowers.”

We said, “that’s great, rip it out,” and haven’t regretted it once.

Do I really want my yard decorated by the sort of people who willfully chose to put wallpaper in their bathrooms seeing no problem with mixing paper and humidity?

It’s a mixed blessing. Though it is nice finding beautiful flowers tucked into different parts of our yard.

When Jenny’s maternity leave ended, all I had to do was walk around the yard with my kids to snip a truly beautiful home-grown bouquet for her office.

Still, it isn’t enough to assume something that looks deliberate is deliberate.

I’ve been carefully monitoring a row of awful weed-looking plants that have sprouted on the garden bed on top of our pool. My initial impulse was to trim it immediately but the placement seemed too intentional so I checked with the app.

As I suspected, they may eventually turn into beautiful flowers called evening-primrose.

The app describes evening-primrose as an herbaceous perennial plant recognized by its yellow flowers which open in the evening and close again at sunrise.

You know, nighttime: the time of day when everyone’s swimming.

I’ll give their evening-primroses a shot this year, but I’ve got a couple of extra weed whacker spools in storage just in case.

Until then, I’ll either be wandering the yard taking pictures of my plants or sitting by the pool waiting for my weeds to bloom.

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Yet, since the landscaper told me to water the spot twice a day “enough to really get it wet but not so much that it pools or makes puddles,” it’s practically all I think about.

This section of our yard has been a continual source of interest to our household since March when the sewer-line-repair excavator first dug it’s shovel into our soil.

Even if you disregard the entire part where the excavator hit a power line delaying his work for three days until an electrician could repair the damage, my toddler daughter spent tons of time watching the excavator work (and even more time since asking, “where excavator go?”).

Now we’re hopefully in the final stages of returning our yard to its glorious crabgrassy nature among the rocky, sandy soil our property has been blessed with – provided I manage to water the area sufficiently for the next three weeks.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t done anything sufficiently in the three months since our second child was born – so expecting me to keep doing something sufficiently for every day for three full weeks is setting the bar really high.

Though I haven’t met that bar on most of the days, I’m trying really hard, which is probably way more than I need to, but is fully in line with my character as an overthinker.

The college-aged kid who laid the grass seed did a fine job but I don’t believe for one minute he stopped to wonder about the contours of the landscape, the implications of his approach or what the final result would look like.

His dad said, “go overseed the giant spot” and he did. As simple as that.

He probably hasn’t thought once again about the job while I’m spending at least some of my consciousness every waking moment thinking about the scale of “enough to really get it wet but not so much that it pools or makes puddles.”

Is that a rain cloud on the horizon? Maybe I should hold off for now.

Hmm, there haven’t been many clouds at all today, perhaps I should water extra long!

Adding to the problem are all the adjustable features on my sprinkler.

My initial instinct was to buy the cheapest, simplest oscillating sprinkler to just blanket the whole area, but then I researched all the options and found a “deluxe turbo oscillating sprinkler” for just ten dollars more.

The marketers had a field day describing these features with phrases like “twin touch technology,” “dirt-resistant drive,” and “advanced-efficiency motor.”

In a sprinkler? Sure.

It’s just a lot of words for saying that you can control the width of the spray and the range of the oscillation, which immediately sold me on the upgrade.

However, the sprinkler manufacturer neglected to warn me that each additional feature adds a variable to your sprinkling capabilities and that variables are an overthinker’s worst enemy.

Instead of just throwing a sprinkler into the middle of my yard and walking away for twenty minutes, I’m now spending the entirety of the time tweaking its performance.

Spatial planning isn’t a strength yet I’m setting up each day like an old-timey sailor trying to chart his course by the stars.

It is surprisingly difficult to get full coverage on an oddly-sized dirt patch tucked into a hill.

If this were a cell phone game, thousands of senior citizen “cat mamas” would be putting down the candy crush to try and make all of my grass seeds wet.

The wind factor alone creates a huge challenge. When you’re shooting twenty small jets of water straight up into the air, even a mild breeze can impact the uniformity of each stream’s performance.

So I stand watch over my set-it-and-forget-it “deluxe turbo oscillating sprinkler.”

Studying the moment instead of living it. Just enough to meet my insatiable need to overthink things, but not so much that it pools or makes puddles.

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I expected a slow thaw to sweetly melt the final layer away calmly ushering in spring.

I imagined standing with my daughter on our front lawn one afternoon with the sun brightly shining down and waving goodbye to the ice as tiny buds poked out from our tree limbs.

That isn’t exactly how it happened.

The ice was broken apart by surprisingly violent wind gusts that ripped large sheets off the edges and crashed them on the shore.

The icy covering didn’t so much as melt away as get power-washed off the surface by a pelting rain and billowing drafts of wind. I’ve never even used my dishwasher’s “pots and pans” cycle so it seemed like overkill to me.

Relax, spring, we’re all rooting for you.

We romanticize spring as a season of rebirth and renewal but like anything in nature it can be violent and cruel.

Yes, spring means baby chickens but the reason we’re told not to count those chickens before they hatch is because several are already dead.

Patience is hard to come by when your time in the sun has come. I’m so excited for spring that I started using a spring-scented fabric softener when I clean my face masks.

It’s not even Easter yet but we’ve already been to the beach.

I pushed my daughter on her tricycle while my wife Jenny pushed our newborn in his stroller. For a second we could clearly see what summer might look like as a family of four once more enjoying the great outdoors.

It was only for a second because the wind shift brought tears to our eyes as we retreated from the evening chill.

New England springs keep you humble.

My own spring humbling came this week when I convinced a small number of families with toddlers to meet at the local library for a socially distanced outdoor St. Patrick’s Day parade.

I enticed them to join by posting a weather forecast calling for 50 degrees and sunny. Three of us persisted, despite the morning’s fresh snow dusting.

My daughter showed up wearing green but as we added layer after layer to her outfit the only green left was the warning signs of frostbite on her fingertips.

Nevertheless, spring persists.

Even on the rainy days my daughter and I can look outside the window laughing at the foraging squirrels.

I’m excited to start tackling some of the bigger projects we couldn’t get to since we moved in right at the end of fall.

We start tomorrow with a long-awaited sewer repair that will rip up my front yard and start the yard-maintenance clock I’ll chase throughout the year.

I recall the number of yellow jacket and wasp nests I saw during the home inspection and know it’s only a matter of time until I’m at war but first comes de-winterization, then yard clean up, then beating back the bushes, and about a thousand small chores more.

I’m only ever one backache away from missing winter’s yard-work freeze.

It’s exciting to start a new season in a new house; we don’t really know what to expect.

It amazed me that as soon as the reservoir’s ice thawed the ducks came back and our sky filled again with honking geese. At least twice per nap-time I ask my wife, “did I hear the baby?” and she responds “no, you’re hearing geese.”

My first newborn reminded me of a cat; this one apparently reminds me of an entire flock of geese.

Mistaking the sound of flying geese with my baby’s cry is the sort of thing that might’ve bothered me with our first child but now I’m just happy for a few moments of flocking quiet in the house.

Might as well rest now; there’s plenty of work right around the corner.

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Connecticut’s housing boom means that anytime you see a dumpster in a driveway it’s likely to be followed with a for sale sign in the yard.

Within the span of two weeks my neighbor filled a dumpster, replaced the stairs by her back door, refreshed the landscaping, and ran a new electrical line.

I waved to her in the distance and thought about asking but we didn’t have that sort of relationship where we “talked” or even “knew each other’s names” so it would’ve been a little strange.

“Hi, I’m Chris. I know we’ve never spoken before but are you getting your house ready to sell?”

Of course it wasn’t any of my business but in many ways it was.

My living room and deck faced directly into her beautiful (and entirely unused) backyard. It was essentially open space amplifying my house’s “country retreat in earshot of a highway” vibe.

I don’t like change and I hate things I have no control over so anticipating new neighbors put me out of my comfort zone.

Every morning I expected the beeping sound of a moving truck to replace my privacy with something entirely distasteful like snarling dogs, brunch-prone twenty-somethings, or competitive badminton players.

Nobody wants their weekends interrupted by people grunting over shuttlecocks.

Of course (despite my brain’s best attempts to convince me otherwise) change isn’t always bad. I also imagined scenarios where the new neighbors have a child my daughter’s age providing Senita a powerful friendship or rivalry to color our quarantining days.

Or maybe they become our new best friends (though history has steered me from establishing friendships with people who can see into my windows).

I settled on a best-case scenario of a widowed pediatrician who’s taken early retirement and goes to bed with the sun every night except for when she’s babysitting, which she loves to do for free any time we want.

It was a fun distraction feeding my daydreams that abruptly ended when the For Sale actually went up – in our yard instead of theirs.

Moving to a new neighborhood is a lot more intense. I scoped the area out after we put our offer in but I’m pretty sure slowly creeping down a cul-de-sac got the police called on me.

Anyways, the officer who approached me while I idled in a nearby parking lot said it’s a very nice neighborhood though I suddenly felt a bit of a big brother vibe (and I don’t mean the delightful CBS reality show).

Nevertheless, we took a leap of faith and moved in October.

It surprised us during our final walkthrough when we learned that our neighbor (who was the seller’s realtor) had also just put her home under contract. The one that looks into our living room and whose driveway runs alongside ours.

Moving past any ethical issues about simultaneously selling an unlisted home directly next door to a house you represent, anticipatory anxiety soared back into my life like a shuttlecock spiraling over the property line and landing among the hydrangeas.

I’ve since watched the house next door with bated breath. My only clue was that my realtor said that their realtor said the new buyers were a “young couple.”

This could mean anything because they both described us as a “young couple,” and I just turned 40 and went Black Friday shopping at True Value hardware. I don’t binge watch TV, I snooze watch TV.

This week it happened. I noticed the moving truck the moment I stepped into my kitchen. Their debut left me with more questions than answers.

We haven’t spoken yet. I thought about ringing the doorbell with a freshly baked treat but this is Connecticut.

What would I even say? “Nice to meet you, my wife’s in the third trimester of pregnancy so let’s talk again once there’s a vaccine. And please, don’t be a crazy person who only talks about vaccines.”

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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It doesn’t take me long to emotionally invest in a place.

I’ve truly loved every place I’ve ever lived including the cinder block college dorms where a roommate was always an arm’s reach away or my windowless one-bedroom apartment across from a permanently-docked steamboat casino in Davenport, Iowa.

But this house, which I left perfectly broom swept with an encouraging note and every copy of our keys and garage door openers on the kitchen counter, was the first I ever owned.

We moved here within three months of getting married.

We’ve cut down trees, cut up downed trees, landscaped, painted, put up curtain rods, took down those curtain rods then put them up again the right way, and done all the little personal things you do to make a house your own.

This house’s siding was the first siding I ever sprayed with a power washer. The driveway was the first I ever used a snowblower on. The land was the first I ever mowed big enough to require a riding mower.

I’ve eaten food from its soil, destroyed bees nests and pests, trimmed bushes, pruned trees, and weed whacked like you wouldn’t believe.

Being a husband changes you. Being a homeowner changes you. Being a father changes you. I experienced all of those changes here.

This home is where I learned that I’d become a dad and then learned how to be a dad.

Selling it was strange; it felt like shedding an important part of my identity.

I also worried about how my 21-month-old daughter Senita would adjust. One of the last things I did in the old house was take a video of her pushing a Swiffer back and forth in the now-empty back living room where she had almost all of her tummy times and where she learned to walk.

I fantasized about synching the video to Madonna’s hit song from 1992, “This Used to Be My Playground,” while interspersing clips of Senita growing up in the house.

I quickly abandoned this fantasy after calculating how long it would take me to edit all the clips together but I’ll keep it in my back pocket in case I’m looking for a new project down the road.

The simple truth is that the house wasn’t a part of our identities. We only lived here because we needed a house with reasonable commutes for jobs we’ve both already left.

Our new home is slightly better for Jenny’s current job, though she’s been working from home since March.

We didn’t buy the new house for a commute though; we bought it to better suit the sort of life we want to lead: open, active, and welcoming (but with enough space for privacy). It’s a little bit flashy but a lotta bit homey.

It’s a perfect place to lay down roots.

Of course, any move involves an assumption of risk, even the ones we go into with open-armed enthusiasm. Taking place amid a national backdrop of economic uncertainty and housing insecurity makes it even riskier.

We’re not just leaving a home, we’re also leaving a community. We’ve essentially decided for our daughter that she’ll never have a life-long friend who isn’t related to her, though “friends since we were two” could come pretty darn close.

Still, I’d begun imagining her life growing up in our old town and I liked how it looked. Our new town has a similarly nice reputation but it is a leap of faith. I find myself wondering often if it was the right choice (and hoping that it was).

Connecticut is the weird sort of place where moving just a few miles in any direction can drastically change the trajectory of a public school student’s life for better or for worse.

It also keeps occurring to me that if I feel an undertone of sadness for a move that excites me, it must be excruciating for the millions (and millions) of families currently facing the prospect of bagging up their belongings unsure of where they’ll go next.

Housing insecurity is on the tipping point of becoming a humanitarian disaster. For now, our governments have stepped in on the local, state, and national level to keep the crisis at bay while they seek a workable solution.

Whatever that solution is, I hope it honors the emotional impact that widespread housing changes will have on our neighbors, their children, and our communities.

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All-cash offers are preferred but any will be entertained. Assuming pre-approval for mortgages, of course. We are civilized, after all.

You may notice some asphalt cracking in the driveway but luckily no grass ever grows between those cracks opening them wider with every new sprout. Please just ignore the mild weedwhacker-string-sized scuffing, that’s a naturally-occurring look.

Behold our curb appeal wonders!

Does the waving American flag make your patriotic heart sing? We fly it all the time and didn’t just rig it up at the last minute since the clamp broke last winter.

Marvel at the freshness and vibrancy of our garden bed mulch. While the lack of any shade whatsoever may hint that the beds bake in the summer sun for twelve hours a day, that can’t possibly be true. A garden bed like that would be overrun by weeds.

And how about the brightly-colored yellow wreath on the front door? This definitely didn’t come overnight from Amazon to replace the bunny that’s been up since Easter. It’s just one of our home’s many bright and cheery aspects.

Step right through our cobweb-free entryway to see my house not as I actually live in it but as you may someday pretend to live in it too.

It’s so bright and spacious with all the curtains and blinds open! You’d live this way too, it wouldn’t have any impact on your privacy or heating and cooling bills.

You’ll notice we don’t keep anything on our kitchen counters. We find that food and utensils only get in the way of all the fun we have polishing our granite counters.

Of course our dish soap and sponge are underneath the sink, where else would we keep them?

Were these fresh vegetables we’re displaying grown from the garden? We’ll never tell but believe me, they’re always in supply, even in the dead of winter.

Isn’t it amazing how all of the baseboards, windows, and door trims are the same color? It’s (probably) always been like that because this house was (probably) built with love.

It’s clear that the two rooms used as home offices hold very productive people because there isn’t any work at all on their desks. And the bookshelves are so well organized with no sprawling piles of books in front of them.

Wait a minute, didn’t the listing say this was a four-bedroom house? We must’ve somehow missed the hallway leading off from the dining room, for some unknown reason.

Wow, a second living room!? You could do SO MUCH LIVING here!

Oh goodness, a play kitchen with a beloved “silly old bear” stuck in the high chair. That unexpected surprise makes you feel good about this house, doesn’t it?

Now look on in amazement at my daughter’s nursery and picture yourself raising a child in this same space with nothing more than three stuffed animals and a nondescript ball for toys.

Wait, why doesn’t this room have windows? Do these monsters make their child sleep in a closet?

No! This windowless space is definitely not a closet; it’s just a room with closet-like tendencies.

Anyways, look at the adorable canvas print of our newborn daughter sleeping in her mother’s wedding veil for a quick dopamine rush.

Wondering where we store all those wipes and diapers? Our daughter hardly needs those, as you can clearly see. Just please, don’t look in my car’s trunk.

Wow, don’t the Shel Silverstein AND Dr. Seuss books prominently displayed on the shelf remind you of YOUR childhood? This closet feels nice.

Room!

This ROOM feels nice. Notice the ductwork and appropriate ventilation.

Wow, look at this master bathroom! Why is it painted like a Marriott suite? Because neutral colors are FUN!

It’s so cool how it has both a jacuzzi tub and a stand-alone shower. It’s great having two options: bathtub OR shower.

Just commit to one so you’ll never have to worry about getting awkwardly out of the tub then running to the shower to rinse off.

Now let’s go back out into the living room to get into the master bedroom.

Wait a second, is that a tiny stuffed owl having a tea party with an equally adorable stuffed pig? I hope that’s made you smile enough not to notice you had to go back through the living room to get to the master bedroom.

But don’t think about that (it’s perfectly normal), think about how big this bedroom is with only one dresser and no laundry hamper of any sort.

There are so many possibilities with this house!

Let’s check out the attached deck where we can enjoy the fire pit always stocked with fresh logs cut from downed tree limbs. Why worry about fall leaves when you could look forward to free firewood with every passing storm!?

Let’s just pause for a moment to relax and enjoy what the listing agent described as, “a piece of the country.”

Isn’t it nice and refreshing with no yellow jackets buzzing around?

Feel the sun on your face.

Hear the birds sing.

Watch the trees sway in the breeze.

You can almost hear the wind. It sort of sounds faintly like interstate traffic echoing up from the valley below, but it’s not. It’s the warm summer breeze.

This is starting to feel like home. Go ahead and make that legally binding offer so it can be yours. Best and final, please.

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Connecticut has a peculiar aversion to central air conditioning. Most of our public schools still don’t even have central air because our local governments are run by seventy-year-olds who microwave their ice cream to take the chill out.

All of New England prides itself on having a temperate climate and stubbornly clings to the myth that fall starts on Labor Day even though September is predominantly a summer month.

It isn’t unusual for the first two weeks of school to consist mostly of unplanned half-day dismissals due to excessive classroom temperatures.

Before buying our house (with central air) my wife and I rented a house that only had one window air conditioner in a central part of the house, which we relied on to ineffectively cool two bedrooms, a bathroom, living room, dining room and kitchen.

Window units only provide adequate air conditioning when you have an entire contingent.

Window units are the chorus singers of the air conditioning world: remarkable when grouped together but as off-putting when individually encountered as a lonely old lady singing to her cats.

I grew up with window units and, while I enjoyed their effect in common spaces, I actually preferred sleeping without them. My bedroom used a reversible window fan to blow hot air out during the day and cool air in at night.

This arrangement worked fine for a single body splayed directly in the fan’s path.

Living with my fiance, however, while I stubbornly refused to buy air conditioners for windows we didn’t own, required me to create a complicated network of fans to redirect the cool air to wherever we were congregating on balmy summer days.

This is how I got my remote-controlled oscillating tower fan.

Oscillating fans overpromise on what they’re able to deliver. Though they hint at room-wide coverage, oscillating fans fall far short providing only sporadic comfort with their weird peek-a-boo delivery method.

Table-top oscillating fans are worthless for anything besides speaking into to modulate your voice like Tommy Boy impersonating Darth Vader.

My oscillating tower fan performed admirably enough for rental-property living but the best fans are installed fixtures like ceiling fans or attic fans.

Ceiling fans are the true champions of single-room circulation. Trickle-down windonomics eventually do pay off.

We love ceiling fans so much in my house that we added two more to the three that were already present when we moved in. They’re great on their own but even better when paired with central air conditioning to help keep the cool air moving.

I marvel at ceiling fans not only for their cooling efficiency but also for how widely they’ve been adopted against overwhelming odds.

Though I’d never, ever time travel (for obvious reasons discussed here), if I did travel back in time one of the top things I’d like to witness is the reception that ceiling fans got when the idea was first pitched.

“You want me to get my whole family to eat together underneath these spinning blades? And then install identical models above our beds? And we just lay there not thinking about whether these wobbly-ass fixtures are going to crush us while we sleep? That’s a hard pass.”

Side note: This column’s assumption that people in 1882 (when Philip Diehl invented the first electric ceiling fan by repurposing his motor famously used in Singer sewing machines) used terms like “wobbly-ass fixtures” may not be historically accurate.

Here’s another reason not to trust ceiling fans: even the ones that are constantly moving still collect a TON of dust. So much dust that it defies logic.

Google says that ceiling fans collect dust because the moving blades create static electricity but I suspect it’s because ceiling fans are powered by witchcraft.

I’m not buying that helicopters can fly through the sky with one spinning propeller but the one whirling above my bed stays put because it’s held in by drywall and an electrical wire.

The only fan that can even come close to matching the reach and performance of central air conditioning is an attic fan.

Attic fans are the fan-family alphas able to suck the air out of every room in the house. This is impressive but really only effective for cooling a house at night when the outside air is cool enough to replace the hot air being blown out.

For true cooling power during daytime hours you need central air conditioning. Having tried all of the alternatives, I can confidently report that central air conditioning provides the most consistent and reliable cooling experience.

This isn’t a controversial opinion anywhere outside of New England.

Everyone south of here knows that central air is essential. Considering that the past two Julys have been the two hottest in Connecticut’s history, it’s time for our state to catch up.

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