Windchimes

if ever I should leave here

I love my house. I like the neighborhood. Oh, sometimes some of the neighbors can get rather rowdy. Plenty of families with teens live around here. And sometimes our street can seem congested, but it's a pleasant kind of congestion, with children riding their bikes and scooters and people walking their dogs. Often someone has a family reunion or other large gathering and making your way around cars parked on the side of the road can present a slight challenge. Most everyone I've met around here waves and asks how you're doing. I love the house, and especially my front porch.

That said, I would always welcome more space. Even if it seems like any newly acquired space magnetizes more clutter, I like believing I could spread it out more thinly.

We've talked about adding on after the girls leave home. Constance thinks that makes absolutely no sense, we should need less space after they move out, but that's leading me down a side road. Adding on is one option, buying a bigger house somewhere else (we don't have to worry about what school district we move into anymore) is another. I hate moving, so it seems like adding on is the better option, until I remember other people's experience with remodeling. It usually takes longer, for one thing, and can cause some acute inconvenience for the duration. I seem to remember my sister's family having to stay in a hotel a couple of nights while their kitchen was being remodeled. I remember a large vinyl flap covering the gape after workers knocked out the wall of our kitchen when I was about 8 years old, when Mom and Dad built a den onto the first house I remember.

So, I suppose the best I could hope for, in regards to acquiring more space, would be to wait until we can afford to hire people to do all the moving, and even that requires some pre-organization. But any house we move into would have to have a front porch just as large or larger than this one. Meantime, I'm happy here.

J.H. Larrew
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