Building a Home with My Husband Read Online Free Page A

real estate Web sites: an actual community. I’ve never even thought about community when I’ve conjured up my fantasy smorgasbord of housing possibilities, but I sure am glad we have it.
    Is it possible that I’m beginning to see less of what isn’t and more of what is?
    We turn toward the river. There, in the shallow water beneath the dam, stands a great blue heron, the same one we saw last summer and the summer before. We’ve even named him. “Look,” Hal says. “It’s Edward, back for the season.”
    “Hi, Edward,” we call out, as we always do.
    Hal turns to me. “Please. Let’s fix it up and stay.”
    “No, no, no, no. It’ll be hugely expensive.”
    “We can get a home equity loan, add in the money from the movie, and make up the difference with our savings.”
    “But you’re fifty-three! Our savings are already nowhere near what we’ll need if you’re ever going to retire!”
    “So we’ll just use some savings, and if we need to, refinance the house when we’re done.”
    “But it’ll be so much work!”
    “This is what I do for a living.”
    “What if things go wrong? I hear all the time about the terrible things that can happen. What if they happen to us?”
    He shrugs. “They just did.”
    I laugh. “I guess so.”
    “And we lived to tell the tale.”
    “We did.”
    “So?”
    I can resist. I can spend the next year hoping to stumble upon a just-listed suburban charmer that miraculously pleases us both. But frankly, I don’t want to take the time—and the petals are opening, and Edward is here again, and Hal is looking at me with his big green eyes.
    “I ask you, Professor Simon,” he says. “Aren’t we already on Teacher’s Lane?”
    Yes, somehow, by a twisting route that took me from love to doubt to anguish to loneliness to regret to searching to reconnection to standing here with my husband as he waits for my answer by this river, I am a teacher, and I have come to live on Teacher’s Lane. And somehow, like the parking signs and their trees—and like Hal and me—I have come to be part of this neighborhood, and it a part of me. Maybe our destinies are already growing together.
    “All . . . right,” I say.
    “Ow-wow-wow-owf!” Hal calls out, and he lifts me up and twirls me around. Then he takes my hand, we wave at Edward, and head up the hill toward home.

D·E·S·I·G·N P·H·A·S·E
    Love
    H al wants to start off small. The smallest room in the house, actually. “It’ll ease us into the process,” he says, as he parks before the bath and kitchen store. “Get you acquainted with renovation before we start the bigger changes.” That sounds like a wise plan, though when we walk inside and come face-to-face with the maze of tubs, sinks, toilets, and cabinetry zigzagging on into infinity, I suspect that the only thing his plan will end up doing is acquainting the client with her accommodating architect, and the architect with his clueless client.
    We venture into angled aisles. “Tell me what you like,” he says, clipboard in hand.
    “I have no idea.”
    “Look. Look around you. Look at these displays. The cabinets are all different. The fixtures. What appeals to you?”
    “They’re all fine.”
    “Fine?”
    “They’re all nice. Nice store displays. But I can’t see myself living in a store display.”
    “What can you see yourself living in?”
    “Beats me.”
    He looks over the top of his glasses with amused annoyance.
    I smile weakly at him. “Sorry,” I say, “but it’s true.”
    He can hardly be surprised. I told him on one of our first dates that I’ve always been ill at ease with the third dimension. Because Hal thinks in terms of things you can see or hear, he was sure I was exaggerating, despite the fact that my conversation seldom strayed from emotions and memory and relationships and the meaning of life. He even teased me about the frequency with which I had epiphanies, playing off the bossa nova song “The Girl from Ipanema” by calling