Not About Food: Rent To Own
Melissa and I have bought our first house.
It’s a simple sentence — compound subject, transitive verb and direct object — but I still have a hard time writing it. I'm not sure I fully believe it. Those of you who have heard the saga of this Berkeley house know how stressful it’s been. For the rest of you, I’ll just say that they accepted our offer three and a half months ago, we closed escrow today, and you don’t want to hear the rest.
Despite the public nature of this site, our private lives stay off of it. But a first house, particularly one in the Bay Area, requires some statement, some demarcation between there and here, then and now.
For one thing, the new house comes with a new budget that will force some changes: Forget restaurant reviews and foie gras for a while. On the other hand, I will focus on my beloved “thrift cooking,” the kind of cuisine that peasants have practiced for millennia: stretching ingredients and preserving food. I’m trying to view our new financial situation as a challenge, not a limit.
Oh, and did I mention gardening? Our house — what an odd phrase — has a yard. Throughout most of this adventure, whenever Melissa or I felt overwhelmed by the tidal wave coming at us, the other would paint a picture of our future garden. Window boxes and pots filled with herbs. Tomato plants. Legumes swirling and twirling around poles and nets. Squashes and corn. If you recommend any organic food gardening books, by the way, please let us know in the comments.
The kitchen — I’m sure you all want to know — is functional but run-down. We’re hoping to renovate in a couple of years, once our budget has returned to normal and other, graver problems have been fixed. I have been saving clippings of kitchen articles for years in anticipation of that day.
We’ll be sharing the food parts of this process with you, of course, and we welcome any advice from other housedwellers about gardening, budget eating, and kitchen thoughts. Because we can do anything we want to the house. It’s ours.
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