A Most Indoor Year
Through a pandemic, three hurricanes, and a new baby—the new house has held up
In September 2019, after three years of emailing back and forth listings, driving around Greater Baton Rouge at rush hour, cringing at orange carpets, wincing at price tags, and stopping our toddler from using the toilet at properties where the water had been disconnected, we did it: We bought our first home!
I have heard millennials are incapable of buying homes these days, and I will allow that it would not have happened at all if the mortgage company’s website hadn’t been so vibrant, with a fluid and friendly user interface. In the delirious final days of inspections and negotiations, I only staggered through thinking of the triumphant Instagram post on the other side. (109 likes, 12 “congratulations”.)
In our front room, my daughter Mae builds towers of translucent tiles in the picture window. Sunset scatters rainbows on the carpet.
The frantic pace of the Baton Rouge real estate market demanded an element of impulse akin to choosing a snack at the grocery checkout, but with a slightly wider price tag. Yes, we knew we wanted three or four bedrooms, space for a home office, and sure, throw in a couple of bathrooms while you’re at it. But only in a few of the homes we visited (and with our excellent, patient realtor, who is also my aunt, Anne Trapp, we visited several dozen) did I feel the heavy blanket of certainty descend on my shoulders as we walked through bare beige rooms.
When we got the timing right, we got our house. A very indoor year later, with a seven-month-old who thinks this muffled, distant world is normal and still has not slept a full night through, we have stuffed these two stories very much with us. But I’ve had enough wakeful hours staring at the sloped ceilings to detail just what I like about the house itself. Step inside:
The Windows
Cardinal directions have never been my strong suit (“So if the Mississippi River travels from north to south and this right here is I-10 West, oh heck, just turn left at the McDonald’s.”), but I’m learning thanks to my house that’s nearly half glass. The sun burrows into one corner of the upstairs bedroom window, a greeting from the East, and I head down to a light-filled living room even before I call out to my robot butlers, Google and Siri. (What would Wodehouse have made with WiFi, Jeeves, and Bertie Wooster?)
None of our windows had blinds or curtains when we bought the house. We have made several officious trips to Home Depot but still not covered every pane. I hope we never will. Well-planted shrubbery lends the kitchen windows a greenish cast as we drink our coffee, eat our breakfast, and wake. In our front room, my daughter Mae builds towers of translucent tiles in the picture window. Sunset scatters rainbows on the carpet.
When our second daughter was born in April, in the midst of the Great Toilet Paper Shortage, we nearly invited well-wishers to our front window, to tap and coo at the new arrival in her terrarium. “... or we could just sit outside,” I said.
The Trees
Outside three water oaks tower and take our backyard just over the edge of suburbia into woodland or, at the very least, grove. We loved the crimped roots at Easter, as they sheltered real and plastic eggs, but when hurricane after hurricane grazed Baton Rouge, we began to plot their removal.
Barring hell and high water, that ugly pair that has visited elsewhere in Louisiana this year and still has a month to reach us, the little backyard kingdom remains intact. I like its fragile peace. Even at the height of her colic, the baby would stop crying the minute we stepped out of the back door onto the patio. Many evenings, I dispelled her witching hour by bringing her out to a concert of the creaky insect world, to which I sometimes added my creaky singing. Tired mothers give so much, but in return we get the stays of our social corsets loosened to sing lullabies. “You’ll never know, dear....”
The Neighbors
It’s not just the baby and me when we retreat outdoors. We have neighbors. Our predecessors had carved an ungated archway into the yard on the left, as their friendship with Frank and Roselyn next door bloomed. We need decades to catch up, and lots of time disappears into our preemptive convalescence this spring, summer, and fall. But with the low fence we can still chat, and someone else sees the baby nearly daily.
We putter in our adjacent yards in step, or rather, Frank sets the pace, and we try to keep up. I’m embarrassed when the vegetable garden turns brown, but I think my sense of the neighbor has been strangled by a weird year and an anxious streak in my generation. (I would not, for instance, put a picture of my garden on Facebook.) After one storm, after he picks up his branches, Frank walks through the arch and tends to ours.
The Character
We’ll paint the bedroom walls some Benjamin Moore blue and maybe one day redo the floors (is there a glitter-resistant flooring?) but the interior came with ample personality in the meantime: built-in shelves and crown molding, winsome window seats, his-and-hers doors to the closet, and an open kitchen for the chatty cook. These features repeat themselves throughout the neighborhood—I can look across the street into another picture window—but they also help me script out the lives of the previous people who made this place home. On the back side of the old-brick fireplace, up the stairs, you can see where the children scratched their names (“Billy,” “Liz”). I trust we’ll do some artful damage of our own in the meantime. “Aw, I think a happy cat lived here,” the next owner will say in seven or so years.
The Room to Grow
“Don’t go making changes immediately,” my friend Rachel said when we first moved in. We were meant to take a few months to learn how we lived in the space.
Instead we embarked on our own HGTV show, Frantic Adaptations to Current Events. We upgraded the WiFi and rigged up a second home office. We stocked our freezer and added a big-kid bed. In summer, we made room for my grandmother’s piano and other bittersweet inheritances. When a major hurricane hit my hometown and displaced family, we inflated the air mattress and popped open a second Pack ‘n Play. The happiest part of a larger place had been the anticipation of houseguests. Home has brought me comfort; I can hold that feeling tight or send it out.
It’s been a hesitant year now owning this house. If the walls haven’t fallen tomorrow, I’ll go to Home Depot. I’ll stop in the paint aisle and ask for their calmest blue.