Moving

For the past three weeks, I’ve taken time off from blogging to move into a new house. Ron and I have lived in Portland seven and a half years, but our house here never felt right to us.

It had a lot going for it. It was bigger than our little Madison apartment, with a lovely, private backyard and a cozy, tucked-away feel. It was nestled into a hillside and felt like a hobbit home, or like a funky wizarding house from Harry Potter. Sometimes, out our windows, mist would settle between the hills and give everything a mysterious quality, and I’d catch myself humming the haunting melody of Hedwig’s Theme.

But the house was dark, and we longed for the open layout and big windows of our Madison apartment. There, sunlight would often stream in and bathe everything in gold. Sunlight is harder to find in Portland, but we realized that being tucked into a north-facing slope, and surrounded by tall trees, wasn’t helping! I started a Zillow search for a sunnier house several years ago.

Finally, in January, our dream house popped up: a midcentury gem in a nearby neighborhood, with an open feeling, fewer trees, and a southwesterly view. We’re now settled into it, and every day we’ve been grateful and amazed at the chance to live here. At night we can see the sun and moon set out our living room windows. Even on gray days, this new place is awash in natural light.

We know we are incredibly fortunate.

“Your place is gorgeous, by the way,” a contractor said to me. “I wish I could own my own home.”

He was a young man who had come to refinish our new house’s rusty sink. I nodded and said we know we’re lucky. My family helped us buy our previous home, and it greatly appreciated in value so we could more easily buy this one.

“That’s awesome!” he said. He told me he lives with his girlfriend’s mother, and that it’s fine, but “it’s time to get our own place, you know?” He’s in his late twenties and has a good job, but the problem is, they still can’t afford to move out. Housing prices have skyrocketed—the value of our first home has almost doubled since we bought it. For people who don’t already own, and who don’t have family wealth to help out, it’s often impossible to buy now.

I’ve heard this from others too. People in their twenties, a cousin who just turned fifty, and a friend who just retired from her job of forty years have all resigned themselves to never owning homes. These are hardworking, frugal people. It’s so terribly unfair.

“I wish I’d been smarter in high school,” said the sink contractor with a fleeting frown.

I shook my head. A person shouldn’t have to be perfect in high school in order to own a home as an adult. “I think it’s a lot harder for your generation,” I said. I told him about all the others I know who can’t afford to buy.

“At least you’re thinking about this at all,” he said.

“We think about it every day,” I replied passionately.

We do.

It seems like what’s needed is wealth redistribution. Higher taxes on the wealthy and super wealthy, and a sturdier social safety net to ensure that everyone has what they need—health care, paid family leave, education, daycare, elder care. This is why I’m progressive. I vote as often as possible for these changes, but still, I’m impatient for them to occur.

So these last few weeks, I’ve moved back and forth between these two conflicting realities: the joy and excitement of moving into our dream home, and the somber, weighty awareness of our privilege and the vast inequality of our country and world.

As I drive to a specialty store to find a doorknob that matches the others in my house, I pass dozens of tent camps along roadsides—the makeshift homes of people at the bottom, those who’ve been pushed out of housing altogether.

As I chat online with CenturyLink’s infuriating help bot, trying to figure out why my printer won’t connect to our new wifi network, a message pops up from a Tanzanian friend who needs help putting her daughter through school. She and her daughter are from my Peace Corps village, where they lived without electricity, in a mud hut with a dirt floor. Now they live in a city and are trying to better their lives.

And daily, almost hourly, I’m fixated on what’s happening in Ukraine. Just weeks ago, people there were living normal lives, and they’re now fighting and dying to preserve their democracy. I am totally gripped by their struggle. As I move through my beautiful new home, with its big sky and open rooms and midcentury wood trim, I’m keenly aware of the millions who’ve fled their own homes this past week, who are hunkering in subway tunnels and bomb shelters or leaving everything they own to become refugees.

By last week, my third week off from writing, I had become restless and agitated. It had been fun to move into our house, but the longer I spent on it, the more materialistic and meaningless my tasks felt. I wanted to do something, anything, to help the world. Writing is my small offering, and it doesn’t feel like nearly enough, but it’s something. I needed to get back to it—to live with a sense of purpose again.

So here I am. We’re moved in, more or less. I don’t know how to solve the problems of the world, how to fix the inequality that makes my life so much easier than so many others’. But I see us all as a web, a vast web of humanity connected through myriad threads, and I have to believe we all have roles to play, ways we can choose to help each other, big and small. This blog is my way of trying to weave us a little tighter, helping Americans understand each other and talk to each other so we can solve problems together.

I hope this post will help me restart the creative juices after my big transition. And I hope what I write will help move us toward a better world.