I live in a house on a quiet street in North Portland now, and am gradually filling it up with plants, books, and art. Having moved in back in December, I've been unpacking more slowly than I prefer - then again, there's more space, but fewer closets here. Shelves are in shorter supply, even if I do have a garage and a massive, half-finished basement. All things I'll be fixing slowly over time - the usual long-running household projects that serve to occupy time I might otherwise spend dissociating into video games.
It's not all wine and roses - though there is plenty of that. The house was unoccupied for at least three months before I moved in, so the plumbing has needed some love. Less than a month after I started living here, the drain in the basement broke, requiring the landlords to hire plumbers to come in with a jackhammer to set things right. The windows require propping open with whatever's handy, and the garage door hates staying up, rendering it more of a storage locker than a place to store vehicles.
But it's two bedrooms and no shared walls, and it's mine until they raise the rent too high. I have dirt and space to plant in, great shrubs of lavender and roses out front, and a surprisingly large kitchen for this town. There's a working fireplace, a porch just big enough for a tiny patio table and two chairs, and a giant pantry cupboard at the foot of the stairs between basement and kitchen. The driveway holds up to two vehicles - three if they snuggly - and most of the traffic I see happens to be folks walking their dogs.
At the tail end of a pandemic season and a slow re-finding and reinvention of the self, this domestic bliss isn't something I quite expected, but I'll take it.