I wanted to buy our house because it's on a street called Harmony Lane. Such a sweet name for a street isn't it? At the time we bought the house we had pieces falling off from all around the edges of our comfortable life. A life, an illusion actually, that I was still trying desperately to keep in alignment with everything that I'd ever thought was good and happy and full of the things it was supposed to be full of. I thought our immediate problem was that we didn't have a home of our own. I didn't know yet what was actually wrong, why the pieces kept falling off, or that the illusion was about to come to an end. All I knew was that living in on Harmony Lane might just make everything all right.
I was born and raised in Billings, Montana. A place that up until we moved to Phoenix four years ago, I had never intended to leave. Billings was my home. I knew everything about it. I knew every nook and cranny of every public building, every side street, alleyway, restaurant and place of business. I've spent time doing a variety of naughty things in every single cave of the one interesting geological feature in the entire area known by locals as the Rimocks. I knew each tree in every local park, each curve on the patch of the Yellowstone River that goes by town, and how to locate every single hole on the bottom of the one remaining public swimming pool.
I always thought I would live in Billings forever. I never even particularly liked traveling and would feel an empty spot drilling into the bottom of my stomach, a longing for home, whether I was traipsing though magnificent places like the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in London or simply taking a day trip to the nearby town of Bozeman for a visit with an old friend. Upon getting back to Billings, my homesick eyes would always devour the familiar and drop it into that spot in my stomach, leaving me filled once again with a deep sense that I was right where I belonged. "It's nice to be home,' I'd say, trying not to seem too dramatic and hiding the fact I'd almost starved to death from the lack of familiar things.
Old houses were a dime a dozen in Billings. I had owned three of them during my lifetime before I had kids, every one of them built in 1917. I had never once even considered owning a new house. The reason for this is very simple. I wanted to listen to the creaking sounds of sunny hardwood floors as my future children played hide and seek while I did laundry in the basement. They'd hide behind old oak doors framed in warm wood moldings covered with a patina it takes almost a hundred years to achieve. Soft, muted colors on old plaster walls, white hexagon shaped tile and the old claw foot in the bathroom, and the smell of freshly baked whole wheat bread would feel normal.
They'd walk home from school on autumn afternoons and crunch with their feet the leaves on sidewalks in front of houses built in a variety of architectural styles. Craftsmen Bungalows, Victorians, Tudor revivals, Southern Plantation revivals, Dutch Colonials, etc. They'd know each house on their block for their unique colors and the unique people who lived in them. They'd be afraid of crotchety old Mr. Helmspot and his walking cane for it's flight through the air at them the times they mistakenly walked on his tulips. But they'd love Mrs. Helmspot for her chocolate chip cookies and that look in her eyes that they didn't yet understand to be the longing for visits from her own grandchildren.
They'd live in the same old house on the same old block for the entirety of their childhoods, and when they came back during adulthood at Christmas time from all different places in the world with their wives and my grandchildren, their old bedrooms would be exactly as they'd left them. And they'd have a deep sense that they had come back to the safest and most wonderfully familiar place in the world. Home.
I realized when we moved to Arizona that I might have to give some of this up. At first I thought I could create the same type of childhood for my kids here in Phoenix. I might be homesick, but my kids wouldn't know the difference. It might be a little hotter and so much for the autumn leaves, but it would feel like spring all the time and maybe we'd have a pool. Mr. and Mrs. Helmspot would surely be there in some form. They'd probably be Mr. and Mrs. Gonzales instead, but I'd always wanted to learn Spanish. So I told the realtor that I wanted a house that represented "who I am." Preferably an old Victorian with oak floors, painted cupboards in the kitchen, and odd little nooks where I could hide plates of cookies and then listen for the kids to giggle in delight upon finding them. So we looked for houses in downtown Phoenix.
Unfortunately, most of the Victorians in Phoenix fell down prematurely because they had been built on sandstone foundations. So right away we started looking for different kinds of old houses. As we searched we found out that it was just too hot here before the invention of air-conditioning for much to have been built before the 1950s, so all of the early twentieth century houses, the Bungalows, English Tudors, and Spanish Revivals were rare, tiny, and incredibly expensive.
They were also the homes of people that didn't support their neighborhood school. Instead, these people shipped their children north to nearby, neighboring districts (Phoenix had an open enrollment policy in which you could send your child to any public school you'd like) or they put them into private schools. I did some research on the neighborhood school and found out that it was one of the best public schools in the city in a variety of ways. So I asked a lot of the people at the open houses why they didn't send their children to that beautiful brick A++ school with the three story Greek columns out front, that was two blocks away. I heard quite a list of half conceived, spur of the moment excuses like, "It's a rough school."
"Really?" I would ask, "How so?"
"It just is," they'd answer. No one could actually think of anything bad that had ever happened at that school, nor could they think of any justification for such a definite answer. And no one actually said it was because its student population was 90% Hispanic.
I finally called the school personally and had a long talk with a lovely woman who discussed statistics with me in relation to the school's safety. It was a safe place. Now, I'm not stupid. Of course there would be some problems as my children look like chubby little ghosts with the whitest blond you've ever seen and gray blue eyes. But in a safe place, these kinds of problems can teach valuable life lessons.
Suddenly, my dreams of our children walking home from school on sunny afternoons with their friends included the possibly of them learning Spanish in the process. Even though this excited me, we still couldn't find a house in that neighborhood that we could afford. There were a few ugly brick ranches from the 1940's that we could barely afford, but nothing else. And I just couldn't bring myself to feel good about paying that much money for a tiny, sort of old house in a neighborhood that didn't support their neighborhood school. I began to wonder what something like that might teach my kids. Oh I agonized over that decision.
The tract houses in the suburbs were a lot less expensive, the population still mixed enough that I kept the hope of them learning Spanish while walking home from school, and most of the people supported their neighborhood schools. So, we started looking at them. Later on I would discover all of this to be pointless anyways. I would find all three of my children in different schools, two of them miles away from my house and requiring bus transportation to get back and forth, and I'd have but a glimmer of hope left that they'd all learn English let alone Spanish. I would also have accidentally, or miraculously depending on whether or not you believe in miracles, found my family in one of the best school districts for children with autism. But, I'll get to that later.
Anyways after finally agreeing to to buy a cheap tract house in the burbs, I was a colossal baby about it.
"They all look the same!" I'd complain incessantly, "It's a good thing we don't drink! Because all these houses are practically identical and if one ever fell into drunken stupor, they could easily mis-judge which house was theirs and end up in bed with some hairy neighbor. Or his hot wife. Hmm. I guess I'm lucky Shane is fully present most of the time these days! I suppose we can just check the address numbers each and every single time we come home before we go in."
My patient realtor would form a crinkle right between her eyes and smile politely. At the next one I would ask her, "Why do they put cheap, white metal windows on dark tan colored houses with no trim? Nothing else is white on that entire house! Could those windows possibly stick out any worse?"
She'd form the same crinkle and look up at the house like she'd never thought of that particular detail before. When we'd go inside I'd continue my tantrum with,
"God these tract houses feel like the insides of hospitals don't they? Metal and beige and white and blah. What ever happened to good, old fashioned wood and a little color? Oh that's right, we're in the burbs. We don't care about architecture out here."
Bless every square inch of that woman's heart for putting up with me.
I really wanted one of these houses to jump out and grab me. But in surrendering to buying a tract house, to the sameness, the lack of interesting details, the death of anything unique, and to becoming one of the boring many among the boring many, I'd discovered that none of these houses was going to JUMP or GRAB. Instead I'd have to search, scour, and want to find something something special, some tiny detail that sung to me and made it mine.
My love, dearest friend, and beautiful husband, Shane, went with her first to look at houses the afternoon we found our house, and I stayed behind to watch Alden, Isabel, and Cale. Our children had become too difficult to take looking because they tended to run around and shatter the valued belongings of the people who still lived in these houses. Alden was five, Isabel three and a half, and Cale was two, yet I was still patiently waiting for them to grow up a little and become normal children.
Shane and the realtor came back rather quickly to tell me that they'd found a house that had the perfect amount of space for us. Four bedrooms upstairs and one down for the office. He was actually semi-excited. As excited as one could get anyways about a tract house. So I went with her to see it while Shane watched the kids.
I was still trying to get used to Phoenix at the time. In Billings, most of the streets are on a nice little grid going north, south, east, or west. They can be trusted. If you go straight for long enough on one street, nine times out of ten you can reach your destination. There's one area of town in which the grid shifts angles slightly. The street dividing the two areas is even called Division Ave., but it still throws people off. The Phoenix valley hosts a giant grid as well, but only with it's major cross-streets. The streets in between these cross-streets cannot be trusted for one second to do what you think they're going to do.
Each house in the Phoenix valley suburbs is sided with stucco, painted some shade of desert tan, and given a tile roof. They go on for miles and miles these roofs, wavy seas of dark, pinkish tile in the middle of the desert. Occasionally, one might come across an older area where the houses are this odd shade of salmon color, but they still have the same roofs.
Now, I've never been a person who easily loses her sense of direction. I can find anything in any city any time. But the monotony of the all the tan stucco occasionally turns even me around. It's a bit like getting lost in the desert. You look in one direction and it looks identical to the other, making it awfully easy to lose which direction you're facing. It would be terrifying if it weren't for the air-conditioned vehicle and giant bottle of mountain spring water.
You tend to get mesmerized by the sameness of the houses and fail to realize that the street is changing as you're driving. One street lined with tan stucco houses slowly turns into another street lined with tan stucco houses as you go around a long bend. The name of the street might actually change several times before you notice. Once you notice you're on the wrong street, you are tempted to try to go back the way you think you came. But unfortunately, because of all the tan stucco, you're not really sure if you're going back the way you came. Suddenly you're saying things like,
"Did we go past that gray truck?"
"I'm not sure. Did you see that black dog before?"
"Well, that's a poodle and I thought the one I saw was a lab. That tree looks familiar."
"Honey, that's a Ficus. Those are on every block."
"OOH! A red bicycle! I saw that before, did you?"
"I did. Great. Now we know for sure we're going in circles. Did we get turned around just after the red bicycle or before?"
"Hmm."
This alone can take a long time. If you are lucky enough to find your desired street again, it might end unexpectedly leaving you to again meander your way back through the complicated maze of tan colored sameness. After some serious recalculation and finding you're way back to the main cross-street, you might think that the desired street continues somewhere on the other side of the cross-street. So you plummet through the chaotic cross-street hoping not to get taken out by the pissed off Phoenix drivers who are sick of the fact that's it's been over 105 degrees for three straight months and who really want to just get home.
Once you're on the other side you first have to find a street in which to enter the block, then hope it takes you around a bend to your desired street. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. But if you don't panic and turn around again, you might find your street and start to feel a little more comfortable. And this, of course, leaves you at risk of once again becoming mesmerized.
Once we finally found the neighborhood we were trying to get to, we drove by a green park, past a sparkling water fall, and through rows of trees and bushes all sprouting red, pink, purple, and yellow flowers. It was a beautiful day. We came around a bend and went by a huge gray box school that held it's park, playgrounds, and sports areas right up under it's protective eye on a massive expanse of green lawn. Children could play basketball, tennis, baseball, or plain old Frisbee right there in the heart of the neighborhood community surrounded by people who actually send their children to that school. I noticed that it said K-8 on the sign out front. "That would be nice," I mentioned to the realtor, who seemed slightly taken back that I'd actually said something nice.
We took a left but I didn't notice the name of the street as we pulled onto it because my eyeballs had rolled into the back of my head from all the tan stucco. As we pulled into the driveway she explained to me that the house was a foreclosure. We got out of her car looking up at the house and I realized it was the same layout as three others we'd seen before. But I kept my mouth shut.
I entered my house and saw sunny yellow walls. Shane was right to have gotten semi-excited. It was the same basic layout as the others we'd seen but with one additional bedroom and a three car garage. It was the perfect amount of space with three separate bedrooms all right across the hall from the master bedroom upstairs (a fact I would grow to seriously appreciate in the months to come), and an additional bedroom on the main floor for the office.
As I wandered around I put the fact that it had been foreclosed on together with the traces of children I found, pink paint in one bedroom, a little plastic doll with green pants on, brightly colored beads in the carpet, and came to the conclusion that this house had lost it's family. Now I had viewed a lot of foreclosures, houses that had lost their families. And many of these had been stripped down to their bones. Whole kitchens had been removed where all that was left were missing expanses of tile where kitchen cabinets used to rest. Bathroom fixtures were missing, carpeting had been rolled up and hauled away, and holes were left lining the sheet rock by people who had taken the copper wiring with them. But my house had been valued.
It had been cleaned, the kitchen and bathrooms left intact, and the garage door openers and mailbox keys left on the counter with a note explaining how to work them. The closet doors were all on their sliders, there was not one hole in all of the walls, and the cans of paint lining the shelves in the garage were lovingly labeled with which room each color matched. "Maddie's room" was on the pink can. This house had been cared for. And it's emptiness consumed more than it's physical space. This alone made me seriously consider purchasing the house.
Later that evening after I'd been trying for fifteen minutes to get my three and a half year old daughter to locate her nose, and she'd finally poked herself in the eye, Shane said to me laughing,
"Wouldn't it be funny to live on a street called Harmony Lane? It's like a take-off of Elm Street."
Completely ignoring his analogy I sprung to full attention. "Harmony Lane? Which house is on Harmony Lane?" I asked looking up at him with wide eyes.
"The one we saw today. You didn't notice?" he continued.
"No," I replied, "I was mesmerized by the stucco again."
With a smile growing slowly and brightly on my face I continued with, "The street is called Harmony Lane? That's sweet isn't it? I think that might be the tiny detail."
"Huh? asked Shane.
"Buying a house on Harmony Lane might just make everything all right," I answered.
So we called the realtor, had the offer in by the following morning, and I sighed with heavy relief that the struggle was finally over. But obviously, it wasn't over.
Not only was buying our house on Harmony Lane not the solution for what was going on in our lives, but the whole experience of it completely foreshadowed the next couple years of my life. I didn't realize it yet, but "who I am" had been built on a sandstone foundation. And over the next couple of years I would find myself in the midst of a crisis that would not only break my heart, but would completely destroy the very structure of who I'd always been.
These experiences would hurl every deeply ingrained belief, every dearly held idea, each hope, dream, thought, and conviction, shatter each mid-air in fierce loud explosions, and then slam the leftovers into the ground. I would find myself frantic and running around, desperately seeking survivors. I would flip over each dying piece, every detail of who I thought I was, and check them all for vital signs. Not one would survive. And I would wake up one day to find that I was left with absolutely nothing that I had ever recognized about myself.
The glorious thing about self-destruction is that a new kind of person can be built out of the debris. I not only have a different kind of house than I'd always envisioned, but I also have a different kind of family, a different kind of life than I'd always envisioned. This is the story of my storm, the resulting awakening, and the birth of a whole new kind of life here on Harmony Lane.
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