Every time I moved felt like facing my entire life all over again.
By Jean Iversen
“And now I’m searching for my last house. Some place to protect me from folks who want to interrupt my writing. I want a wall for privacy, a vestibule between the outside and inside areas, and…an outdoor sink, so I can wash under the sky and think and think. I want a house to take care of me.”
─A House of My Own, Sandra Cisneros
In the chaos of a pandemic, I decide that I need my own home again. What followed was a dizzying series of showings, anxious texts to and from a real estate agent, and getting outbid on properties only hours after they went on the market. At the tail end of six exhausting months, I was able to snag a small condo in a beautiful brick building on the Northwest Side of Chicago.
After suffering three horrid landlords in four years, at an age better suited for gazing into a lit hearth while sipping warm tea, not repeatedly packing and unpacking a lifetime in bubble wrap, I was home.
“We fell in love with the floor plan here,” says my new neighbor Eileen, who has lived in the building with her husband for over 15 years. “There’s nothing else quite like it. A true Chicago bungalow.” I come from a family of architects and builders. I know that only single-family homes can be designated as true Chicago bungalows, and our multi-unit building didn’t make the cut. But I’ve always dreamed of owning a bungalow, and rather than correcting Eileen, I adopt it as my truth.
A month after I move in, my neighbor Marlaise has me over for coffee. There, in her living room, stands an imposing giant-screen HDTV and accompanying sound bar. Dozens of houseplants spill over the windowsills and countertops. It turns out that the giant-screen TV is Marlaise’s concession to her boyfriend Marco, and the plants are his concession to her. I sense the air of happiness in their place, which is only slightly larger than mine. A sense of contentment and peace.
But instead of also feeling the familiar pain in my chest that surfaces when in the homes of happy couples, the TV and plants instead make me realize that my new beautiful bungalow is mine, and mine alone. Mine to carve out a place to write, and spend hours laboring over a stalled book project. Mine to fill the walls with the photos and paintings I’ve accumulated over a lifetime. Or order furniture that suits my needs, plot new paint colors on my own timeline, spend more money on books than a couch, and not have to answer to anyone for my extravagance or my thrift, both of which can swing to an extreme. In my new home, for once, I don’t mourn space unfilled by another. Instead, I embrace the solitude, which occasionally alternates with guilt for being so selfish.
After my coffee with Marlaise, this feeling lingers. As I run my hand over the varnished millwork that adorns my doorways and private stairwell, my thoughts turn to one of my sisters. She has been in a marriage that has subsisted on obligation and convenience for most of its 30-plus years. Though I would never tell her to leave or stay in what looks to me a dead end, I dwell on the fact that she has never had a home of her own. She went from our childhood house, to the military, to marriage. A gifted poet, she has never had a private space to dream or write, I realize, with a new ache that swells in my chest. It is pain for my sister, and gratitude for a new home.
Sandra Cisneros described a house as “a life raft to keep you afloat when the storms sweep everything else away,” particularly for working women like herself. Thinking about my sister, I appreciate that I have loved, lost, built, and rebuilt, over and over again. I am living alone in a too-small condo, but I am thankful to be living on my own terms. I have my own life raft. I am free.
***
The first few months after my move—the fourth in five years, since we’re keeping score—I am in survival mode. Food arrives by Instacart while I repair from the exhaustion of relocating. I’m happy just to have a clean towel. Happy that my cat has come out of his post-move hiding place, a closet he has declared his new safe space. Happy that my Bluetooth is working and I have music. That I finally have WiFi and know which parking spot is mine. My life raft has been inflated and pushed gently onto the stormy seas.
At my last rental, I cursed the expanse of walls I wasn’t allowed to paint. Forced into isolation in 2020, there’s only so much eggshell one can take, especially when it fills a loft with 11-foot ceilings and long narrow hallways begging for a mural or accent color. Not being able to paint was a minor league problem; when my landlord took months to replace the new-but-defective appliances, one after the other, I knew it was yet another place I wouldn’t stay long.
When you know you are leaving a place, you never really stay. You pause, hopping from one foot to the other. One hand is always on the doorway. Boxes are left unpacked. No effort is made to find the right night stand or a dining set that fits. You repurpose what you have, store what you can’t, let the furniture stay where the movers arrange it.
I lived in the same house my entire childhood, from the day I was brought home from the hospital to the day I left for college. I then hopscotched around Chicago’s lakefront neighborhoods from crappy apartment to crappier apartment before buying my own place in West Town, where I lived for 16 years. A series of health crises forced me to sell, and landed me back in the rental market, a place I never thought I’d return. It was a horrible fit for a stay-at-home writer who likes everything just so.
Every time I moved felt like facing my entire life all over again. Everything was carefully reorganized, shredded, recycled, donated, sold, handed down, or tossed in the garbage. Photos. The books I acquired, published, or edited. School papers. LPs. My piano music. Recordings, clippings, and photos of all my old bands. Mom’s jewelry boxes, the dozens of wall hangings, old clothes. The dollhouse my father made. Cards, letters, gifts. Everything I’d inherited after losing both sets of grandparents, then, more acutely, both of my parents.
A basement flood at one two-flat I rented claimed a huge portion of my keepsakes, forcing me to dump bins of clothing, old photos, letters, and sheet music destroyed by water damage or mildew. I dropped down on the concrete steps outside that basement and sobbed from the pit of my stomach. Everything rescued from that flood is now protected in air-tight storage containers, stacked three, four, and five high in a climate-controlled storage locker. A sacred altar to my past.
I’ve taken similar pains to preserve my treasured belongings for years, never quite certain why, since I’ve hardly had the space for it all. While nursing a cup of coffee in my new bungalow, it finally dawns on me: I’ve been curating my dream home, or at least a place where I feel settled enough to unpack it all and surround myself with the memories of my life. I’ve been saving it for a time that felt closer to now.
***
When she was asked to write the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros searched for a photo of herself from 1980, when she wrote her bestselling book. She describes her younger self, alternating between first and third person.
The young woman in this photograph is me when I was writing The House on Mango Street. The young woman fills her “office” with things she drags home from the flea market at Maxwell Street. Antique typewriters, alphabet blocks, asparagus ferns, bookshelves, ceramic figurines from occupied Japan, wicker baskets, birdcages, hand-painted photos. Things she likes to look at. It’s important to have this space to look and think. The things in her office are magical and invite her to play. They fill her with light. It’s the room where she can be quiet and still and listen to the voices inside herself. She likes being alone in the daytime.
Six months after the move to my new bungalow, my life raft is carrying me across the waters, bobbing gently and safely, and I consider filling my space with things that will allow me to look and think. My mind settles on a few treasures that I squirreled away but weren’t in any of the now-unpacked boxes, so I head down to the sacred storage locker to rummage.
I have whittled my life to such a small selection, it takes only minutes to find them all. My grandmother’s necklace of amber beads. The silk fringed scarf I bought in New Orleans. The family cookbook my mother made for us. Notebooks I used in grad school. And the wind chimes I bought during my one trip to Japan. I hadn’t seen them in years, but I yearned for their sweet, tinkling bells. I grabbed the wind chimes, along with the cookbook and the beads and a few other items, refugees from the nostalgia of my past.
I set up a space to write in the dining room. A carpenter helped me install bookcases for the book collection that had grown like urban sprawl over the years, and I placed cherished keepsakes on my desk, including a vintage magnifying glass and a nameplate rescued from my last office job. Notes from colleagues, students, and friends lined my desk drawers.
I held one of the wind chimes in my hands, its delicate ring familiar to my ears. They’re called fuurin in Japan and are commonly hung outside homes in hot summers to evoke coolness. I read that they also have the ability to ward off evil spirits.
My most recent apartment was in a newly constructed high-rise building with a sophisticated intercom system. Cameras were trained on anyone who entered or exited the building as well as the elevators, package room, hallways, and garage. Cameras filmed me throwing my garbage into the chute marked rubbish, getting in and out of my car, retrieving my mail, and chatting with my neighbors. Residents clamored for camera footage whenever an unfamiliar face was in the building, or someone was found in the common areas not wearing a mask.
I felt safe and secure from that penthouse perch, but the constant surveillance didn’t settle right in my bones. A resident posted on our building’s Facebook page a screen shot of an old man in a wheelchair waiting outside our locked main entrance in the cold. The post warned Do not let this man in! I felt sick to my stomach that this post even existed, and that no one replied with a stern objection, including me.
I had seen this old man before. His name was Clarence, and he told me his daughter lived in the building. She hadn’t given him an electronic fob to use for the days she wasn’t home to buzz him in, he told me. He didn’t say why. Clarence was grateful that I walked beside him in the crosswalk, as his wheelchair was hidden from view of impatient cars that raced through our bustling South Loop neighborhood of glass high-rises and shopping malls. He needed a tall neon flag secured to the back of his wheelchair, I thought. That photo of him, posted to our building’s Facebook page, haunts me, filling me with angst that anyone would consider this man a threat or allow him to wait outside in the Chicago winter without a proper coat.
My beautiful bungalow was built 100 years ago. There is not one surveillance camera on the property, not even a Nest on any of our back porches. In the basement is a bulletin board, where my neighbors post articles about native plants and phone numbers for plumbers. Owners are assigned tasks, like mowing the lawn, getting bids for tuckpointing, or gathering quarters from the old washers and dryers.
I decide that my wind chimes, the fuurin, will be my new bungalow’s security system. It was as old-school as it could get, but old-school settles right in my bones. It feels familiar, and familiar is a welcome, forgotten place. I loop one wind chime around the back doorknob and hang the other above my front entrance. The tinkling bells will announce any visitors or intruders—the Chicago version of evil spirits.
Jean Iversen is a Chicago-based writer and editor; her essay “Counting Cranes” appeared in the Belt Publishing anthology, The Chicago Neighborhood Guidebook.She has published numerous articles, features, essays, and books, including Local Flavor: Restaurants That Shaped Chicago Neighborhoods with Northwestern University Press.
