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My uncle is selling his house. I saw the listing posted on my cousin’s page and cried.

I said to Jim I didn’t know why I was crying. I like my uncle, but we’re not incredibly close or anything. It’s a beautiful house but not mine. I have a lot of great memories there but not a ton.

I felt like an idiot.

I mean I did start my period did the next day. But. Whatever.

It didn’t make sense to cry over this at first but as I processed I began to think maybe it wasn’t that ridiculous to be emotional.

When I was little, my uncle lived in this garage-turned makeshift living space. It was tiny and uncomfortable; when we visited it was for BBQs, not hangouts in the garage/apartment. I felt bad for him. How lucky was I to live in an actual house?? Sure I had to share my room with my younger sister, and yeah it was a mobile home, but I felt I had it better off.

My mom’s brother had four kids, a wife and a, then, nearly empty plot of land. He was a contractor...or construction worker...or something like that? I’m no good with the terminology but he built houses for a living. At the time he was just one of the people on the team doing the construction. I don’t know when all the promotions happened or how he ended up owning his own company because I was a kid and didn’t pay attention to all that grown up talk. But at some point he was the owner of Forguson Construction. It was very impressive and he made more than anyone else in our family.

While he was working up the ladder professionally, at home, on his empty lot, he slowly and meticulously built his own house. It was impressive as fuck. He did most of the work himself with the help of a few buddies and my other uncles, only hiring out for the specialty stuff like plumbing. It felt like it took a decade and maybe it did. Even after they moved in a lot of small things like baseboards were still being worked on. I remember the banister leading up the main stairs to the second floor never having been put in. I always ended up taking the staircase on the other side, terrified I would fall off the other one.

When it was done, it was a modest mansion. Five bedrooms, three and a half baths, three fireplaces and a three-car garage. There was a living room, kitchen and dining room all in one open floor plan downstairs but also a study and large rec room. Upstairs were the bedrooms and a room that, from what I could tell, was a space literally created for the sole purpose of letting the kids mess it up plus an elliptical.

The house had lovely touches that all seemed fancy and luxurious without ever verging on pretentious. The master bedroom had a private deck connected to it and a bathroom attached. The bathtub was large enough for two people, jetted of course, and set against bay windows overlooking their yard. There was no wall between the bedroom and bath so that if someone were taking a bath the person in the bed had a full show.

I dog-sat for them a couple years ago and spent most of my week in that tub, drinking their wine. (Hey I replaced it! Most of it.) I remembered thinking this set-up must be extraordinarily romantic. Perhaps it was the reason that of his four siblings, this particular uncle is the only one to not have gotten divorced.

This place wasn’t just nice. It was homey. Yes, the house was impressive. But I was never uncomfortable. I visited the home of my step-daughter’s aunt on her mom’s side a couple years ago. As we parked in front of the house to pick up April, I remember thinking There’s no way this is the right address. This house was obscene. I don’t know how many people reading this are following the housing market in East Texas, but shit is cheap. I, who some months struggle to pay rent on my modest, run-down house in Tacoma, Washington, could afford a preeeeetty nice place down there. And my step-kid’s aunt and uncle were both doctors. I could be remembering it incorrectly but I think the house was about eighteen stories high. There were half a dozen gargoyles glowering at me from the roof, both an indoor and an outdoor wood-fired pizza oven and a gated moat.

Ok, but seriously, it looked about like Rory’s grandparents’ house on Gilmore Girls, maybe a tad fancier, and actually the pizza ovens were real.

That doctors’ house in East Texas made me profoundly uncomfortable. April’s uncle was perfectly nice and all that but looking around his home I didn’t feel like I should speak to him without bowing. When April got there after school she bounded in like it was no big deal, like she wasn’t standing in a literal CATHEDRAL.

I got out of there as fast as I could.

However, when you show up to my uncle’s house, a few dogs leap at you when you open the door, a towel sitting there on the floor to wipe their muddy paws when they come back in. My uncle greets you with a hug and asks if he can grab you a beer. It’s Coors all the way there, so I usually bring my own because I’m a snob. He invites you for horse shoes or my cousins ask you to play pool. We sit around the (large and high quality but not pretentious) fire pit and listen to country music, watching the kids hang out or play poker at their dining room table. My cousin might take you on a ride through the woods (muddin’ as us country folk, or former country folk in my case, call it) in his jeep and there’s no end time to the hangout; crash on the couch if you get too drunk but someone is probably staying up even later than you chatting around the fire.

The first time I went out to write at a bar after covid restrictions were loosening up, I was shocked at the increase in tents for people without homes. I try to say houseless instead of homeless; I’m not actually sure if one or the other is more sensitive but the former feels right to me. It made my heart ache.

I recently visited a venue for a drag show and took some of my tipping ones out to tuck into the spaces between the tent fabric and support poles near my parking space. It was a measly amount and no big deal to me, $2 each for the three tents. But one guy came out and said, “Thank you so much.” He seemed to really mean that, even after seeing it was only two ones. I said, “Of course, I’ve been there.”

But the thing is, I haven’t really been there. I lost my job maybe six years ago at the tail end of grad school. I understood then that I could have ended up there. But I didn’t. I have a large family- my parents both continued the four-kids-to-a-family tradition of their parents. My mom (divorced from my dad) didn’t have the space for me at that time but Dad did, and I moved in with him for more than a year.

First of all, schizophrenia runs in my family. If you don’t know what that is, it’s an awful disease of the mind that causes you to engage in hallucinations and/or delusions; hallucinations/hearing are seeing things others do not and delusions are believing things that are clearly and profoundly untrue. These can be mild or life-altering. I was one little speck of DNA away from having this disease. And part of the disease is that you don’t understand you’re ill. And antipsychotic medications are usually pretty effective, but many people stop taking their meds because they don’t think they need them. So you know that houseless person you mock because they walk along the sidewalk speaking to themselves? Welp, that could have been me, instead of me having attended grad school then producing this article you read. Or it might literally be a cousin of mine, who had the misfortune to inherit the gene.

I remember thinking at that time what if my parents had both died in a car crash or something when I was younger, where would I have gone? But honestly the answer is: To any number of my loving and kind aunts’/uncles’/siblings’ homes. Of course, they aren’t all always able to accommodate, but someone would have been. I have never actually been close to being houseless. I am blessed beyond belief to not only have the volume of family I do but also the quality.

Job-loss happens. It happens to a lot of people for all kinds of varying reasons. And yes, of course, at times it’s active addiction and criminal records blah blah blah. But even those cases are so often complex. (If you want to fight me on this, bring it on.) And a lot of the houseless people you see today are not part of that demographic; the folks in front of the drag show venue all had nice new tents, presumedly recently houseless, part of the recent covid casualties.

When I was fired and moved in with my dad, he lived in a house he always planned to “fix up.” He never did finish the project, so the house was always kind of half done. However, it was right on the water. A river. Deschutes River, I think. Solo, he didn’t have the amount of property we had growing up, but it was a nice little acre or so. You could sit in the sloping green backyard near the willow tree and listen to the water bubbling by in the summer. There was a spot down the road we called, “The Point.” It was technically owned by someone else I think, but the whole neighborhood had permission to go down there; the river darted into a sixty degree angle along a steep river bed on the other side, creating a point of land and a deep, clear, slow-moving pool of water.

My dog, Emma, lived with us at the time. She loved Grandpa’s house. Loved loved loved it. We’d sit in the yard together in the sun. I’d drink beer, she’d sit at my side watching me with pure love in her eyes. I’d read, listen to music. When it got really hot we’d go to The Point. I loved swimming in it and she’d never actually join me because water terrified her, but she’d walk along the edge, dipping her dainty little toes in and keeping an eye on me. When she passed away, I couldn’t stand driving up to the house and always expecting to see her run to my car, or sitting in the living room watching Big Bang Theory with my dad and looking over to the corner where her bed used to reside, still expecting her to be there. I moved within a month of her being put down.

I moved in to this little apartment I loved. It was tiny, but in a beautiful building. It had been a high-end hotel a century ago and still felt like it. I could only afford a studio, but the hardwood floors were gorgeous and the claw foot tub was a dream. I had a view of the water and Mt. Rainier.

And then I met Jim.

And yes of course, Jim is wonderful. He’s handsome, he’s intelligent. He’s one of the kindest humans I’ve ever met and reminds me a lot of my dad.

But I told Jim when I met him my goals in life. They’re not complex.

1. Travel the world.

2. Buy a house.

3. Fill said house with dogs.

I looked at him with daggers in my eyes and said you will not mess up my goals for me. I mean it.

But of course we fell in love. I moved in with him after about four months which is quick but we were paying rent on two places and only ever staying at his because he had a dog. And once we did that, child support is almost a thousand a month and then there are the visits to see his kid and her birthdays and trips to the beach and she needed clothes and shoes and on and on.

When I left my beautiful little studio, Jim’s dad was helping us move. They had taken a load down together and I gave myself a minute to feel my feelings. I sat in the kitchen. I thought about all my nights, drinking wine and blasting my Kate Nash, cooking for one in the kitchen. I would spend other evenings sitting in a chair looking out to the waterway, marvelling that I had this space, this tiny lovely space, all to myself. (And my cat.) I loved the scent of the hardwood floors. I loved my four-hour long Saturday night soaks in the tub. I liked that any time I was bored before 2 am I could wander downstairs to the queer karaoke bar and grab a drink with new friends and cool off on the sidewalk chatting with drag queens on their breaks.

It was a single girl’s dream.

My partner’s father came up sooner than he did and found me sitting on the kitchen floor crying. I know he has a daughter and multiple granddaughters, but his #girldad hat went on and he immediately asked me if I was ok and if I needed him to do anything. I sobbed and said, “I just- I just- really love this place.” He nodded and silently, awkwardly, patted my shoulder. A generally cranky older man, I love him for this.

We’ve been looking into buying a house. I had planned on buying it myself on my salary/credit and just having Jim live there, then Covid happened. I quit my job and the job I had quit it for fell through. I’ve been blessed with unemployment benefits and the time to write since. But it’s hard. Even after I go back to work, the market is nuts. Seriously nuts. Places comparable to our rental in our area are going for, not $200k like there were a couple years ago, but $300k or $400+. I even floated the idea of moving to Texas but even as much as we don’t want to live there, my stepdaughter loves the progressive values of the PNW. I even accidentally, casually mentioned that we had thought of moving there and she was shocked. She said, “But. I love the people besides you I visit when I’m up here! When would I see Nana and Papa and my cousin and aunt and uncles if you moved to Texas?”

So we’re kind of stuck.

My dad sold his place on the water last year. The rest of my family of origin (parents/siblings) live in basically the same two towns, except for me and my older sister. It was a good fit for him. All of his grandkids, minus April, live within a 20 minute drive. My mom moved onto his property in a fifth wheel and they get to host the grandkids together. My mom helps with the maintenance of the property that’s hard for him after his cancer treatment and he loves being closer to town. But I cried a lot when he sold it. I cried that I would never visit The Point again, Emma or no Emma. We had an uncharacteristic, for the PNW, heatwave last week and I cried more that I had no easy swimming hole to visit with April.

It’s hard.

It’s harder to lose these places I have called home, or homey, when I am getting further and further away from my plan of owning my own home.

My stepdaughter came out as queer last year. I mean, her mother, my partner and I, had all guessed she was. But it was so good to hear her say it officially. She wanted to decorate the whole house for Pride this year and of course we said yes. But she loved the idea of hanging a large rainbow flag on the porch. It killed me to tell her we couldn’t, because the landlord wouldn’t like it.

The carpets need to be replaced and I’m itching to take care of it myself. We want a dishwasher, I want a bigger tub. But we can’t do any of these things. Because we have to rent.

My uncle’s house, which I’ve always thought would be $500k, then $600k then $700 is, in this market, selling for $1.2million. And I’m happy for him. I really am. He’ll be happy in Florida with his grandkids. And watching my parents age I’ve seen that the only thing that matters at that stage is the grandkids. And I get that.

I’m sitting here on my Hill of Privledge, crying about childhood haunts lost, or my dream home being out of reach, when there are people actually struggling. So many people, people reading this article I’m sure, are temporarily houseless, or stuffed into something they’re not used to, because of this crazy damn pandemic. Or because of mental illness. Or a billion other reasons.

And I know people look down on me for taking advantage of the unemployment benefits during the pandemic. I could have worked; I’m young and had no underlying conditions at the beginning of our 2020 plague. I could have still engaged in the rat race to get to my goals.

But I’m tired. My back hurts and I’m tired of manically chasing money that will most likely not be enough for quite some time. I want to write. But I also want to go swim at The Point on a hot day. I want to attend one more poker night at my uncle’s house. I want to watch one more sunset in my studio apartment over the water. But I can’t. My priorities have changed. Much as my mom and her generation really don’t care about much more than grandkids, I don’t care about much more than April. We need to make her child support on time. We need to nurture relationships with her mother. We need to fund trips to Texas to see her and get her out to the ocean.

And you know what? She’ll love our dream home. Eventually. When we can get it. But right now, I’m thinking about getting her to the Pride celebration in Tacoma she can’t really attend in Texas. I’m trying so hard to please her mom and foster communication. I’m worrying about school districts if she decides she needs to move here for the LGTQ-friendly politics. Things change. I’d say I’m mad about that. But I’m not.

I’m profoundly, unambiguously, lucky.