I’ve been engaging in house-lust for quite some time now. My original plan (or, in light of my financial situation, ‘fantasy’) was to own a house by the time my daughter turned three, which will be at the end of this year. One of the many oaths I pledged to myself and my child before her arrival was to provide a homestead for our little family of two, no matter what. Even though I’m a single parent, I wanted to provide her with the same wonderful physical environment my parents provided my brother and me growing up.

We started with a custom-made ranch in the late ’60s.  When my brother and I hit our teens, my parents had a second floor added. What my memory-bliss revolves around, though, isn’t the house itself: it’s the area surrounding it.

We lived in a nice, middle-class neighborhood with tons of kids our age. We were out of the house for hours a day in the summertime, roaming the yards and streets with impunity and safety. No one was terrified at the thought of their children being out of their sight, in some unknown person’s house. No one chased us out of their yards or complained if we scrambled over, or under, their fences.  My brother and I knew we had to be home when we heard the downtown fire station’s horn-blast, which happened exactly at eight o’clock every night.

My favorite place, though, was the wilderness.  Our neighborhood was shaped like a comb, with tine-streets. We lived on the spine, which was only a few hundred feet from the river.  Our ample backyard gave way to forest, sloping down to the river-proper and also a small lagoon. That was my Narnia. That parcel of wilderness had everything: blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and those tiny woodland strawberries. There was the now-endangered state flower, the ladyslipper, dotting the forest floor. There were perfect climbing trees, and ones that jutted out over the water, providing a wonderful seat as you dropped your fishing line into the murky water. There were sunfish, hornpout, giant goldfish-y ones. The myriad songbirds serenaded you all day; the bullfrogs kept you up at night. There were mica-encrusted rocks to set the burgeoning rockhound’s heart afire. I couldn’t stop writing about or drawing it all.

It is obviously a deeply-romantic sentiment I have around my childhood home. But even if my experiences have been clouded by the revisionist-history of time, I still want that for my daughter. We own a nice condo now, and it too is in a safe, quiet neighborhood. But there are hardly any other children. There’s no real wilderness for her to explore. And even if there was, could I even imagine letting her wander off into it, alone? The idea makes me shudder.

It’s not too late for my plan to become actualized; there’s still half a year left. Maybe the housing market will turn around. Maybe I’ll finally see that dream house as I scour the real estate section of the paper one Sunday. Or maybe I’ll build a time machine and take my daughter back to be raised in the halcyon days of my own youth.