Home-hunting (part 1)

More than 6 months ago, Paul was given a conditional offer of a job that would involve us moving to Sacramento.  Because of the type of job that it is, there's an extremely lengthy background check that has to be passed before the job is officially offered.  Things are nearing the end of the background check & so it's beginning to seem more real that we might be moving.  I have mixed emotions about a move, in spite of that, we've started looking for a house in Sacramento.  Tomorrow, I will see 6 more.

A little over five years ago, I left behind my friends & family to move to Saint Paul, MN to be with the man that I love.  We lived there for 4 years & then moved back to CA a year ago last June.  Before that, I had hopped around from place to place in the Bay Area & then settled in Chico, CA for three years before I married Paul. 

When Paul & I learned that we were expecting our first child, we started thinking more seriously about putting down roots.  Paul felt stuck in his job & the hours were terrible for raising a family.  I missed my family back in CA & so we decided to look for a way to move out west.  It would be 2 years before a position opened up for Paul.  In the meantime, our daughter was born & we met a group of new parents through a family education program sponsored by the state of MN.  We soon developed friendships with these parents & for the first time since moving to MN, Paul & I felt we had some sort of community around us.  We found a faith community that fit us & I met a few people there that I really clicked with as well.  I began to waiver in my desire to move back to CA.  Saint Paul finally felt like home to me.

After nearly two years of waiting, no jobs had appeared in CA.  So we decided to buy a house & just call Saint Paul home indefinitely.  We searched online for months, then decided to go out with an agent.  We found a home at 897 Hague that we loved & put in an offer.  Our offer was accepted & then I went to CA to sing at an event & take our daughter, Isa, to see her family for her first birthday.  The inspection of the home revealed quite a bit of issues, but during my trip to CA the tension that I felt between wanting to live in CA & not wanting to leave MN was revealed even more strongly.  Paul felt it too & we backed out of the house. 

Nine months later, the door opened for us to move to Concord, CA.  Amidst the threat of lay offs & furloughs, we decided to take the plunge.  We were more than ready to put down roots by this time.  So we found a real estate agent to show us around Concord & talked of buying a home.  Even with the market being what it is these days, we couldn't find anything in our price range that seemed like a fit.  So we decided to look north in Vacaville.  We found another agent & spent a day looking at our options before deciding that Vacaville wasn't going to work for us either.  So we hunkered down in a home that we rented in Concord to wait it out & see if a job transfer to a more reasonably priced area might be a possibility, all the while, longing more than ever, to just be done & call a place home.  In the meantime, we looked at homes to buy in Chico, where my family lives & dreamed of calling Chico home. 

Another 6 months passed, and the job offer to move to Sacramento came.  Of course it came just as we'd started to feel a little more at home in Concord.  Now, the time to move is approaching, though not 100% finalized & I find it difficult to be excited about it.  I am going out with a real estate agent to look at homes tomorrow.  It's not that I'm not excited to see what there is, its just that it doesn't feel real, maybe, in part, because my true longing has been for community, connectedness & getting to the point where I could feel like I'm planting my little family in fertile soil---and, without sounding trite, you can't buy that.  So the house-hunting part of the journey has lost its luster for me.  Don't get me wrong, it's not that I'm above the desire to have walls around me; actually I want extra tall walls like in the homes built around the turn of the century, with just the right colors on them to match my couch & collections of pictures & nick knacks.  It's just that I'm surprised how the thing that represented home to me the most used to be a house & now, not so much.  It might sound silly, but that realization does kind of impact that type of house that we buy.  If community is what we're after, what type of neighborhood do we look for?  What type of house?  One that's big enough for friends & family to visit?  One that has a real neighborhood-y feel? If we moved out here so that Paul could find a job that better suits him & our family life, how much house do we buy so that we don't become a slave to a mortgage?  I have a laundry list of about ten other things/questions I'm asking myself as we embark on what feels like the last leg of our journey to "move to CA."

The other day, I read a chapter from a book called Soul Graffiti by Mark Scandrette.  At the end of the chapter he asks the reader to identify 5-7 tangible needs & if you have the courage, to turn the list into a prayer.  I appreciated the fact that he uses the word courage in connection with prayer because for me, these days, it takes a lot of courage to pray and so mostly I don't.  My needs centered around some of what I talked about above--roots, community, a home.  A small part of me had the courage to pray for those things, most of me did not.  At the heart of my prayer was the desire for wisdom to know how to find what I truly need, not just what I want or think I need, in a home. 

Later in the same book, the author quotes a prayer from the Orthodox tradition.  The first part goes like this:

Lord, I know not what to ask of You.  
You alone know what my true needs are.
You love me more than I myself know how to love.  
Help me to see my real needs, which may be hidden from me. 

I am grateful that I've been house hunting for over 2 years now.  In fact, it was two years ago this week that we put in the offer on that house on Hague Ave in Saint Paul.  It has helped me to see what my real needs are.