Home sweet home

My daughter and son-in-law are house-hunting, and I'm having trouble wrapping my brain around the idea that a child of mine is able to contemplate buying a house. After all, it was just six years ago this week that my husband and I finally bought our first house.

Unless you count the house we bought 25 years ago, which was not, in the strictest sense of the word, a house. It was a home--a mobile home to be precise, although both halves of that phrase are problematic.

It was a home--for the two of us and a host of other small woodland creatures. At various junctures we had chipmunks in the pantry and a rat in the bedroom, and once we came back from a vacation to find a recently deceased mouse under the sofa and a discarded snakeskin coiled around the top of the water heater in the pantry. I tried to assure myself that the snake might discourage the vermin population, but I didn't find this terribly comforting.

This "home" had started its life in 1948 as an 8x30 foot trailer, but it had long since ceased to be mobile. Decades before we bought it, someone had parked it in the back corner of a trailer park, with nothing separating the trailer from the train track but a shallow dip where people sometimes illegally dumped their trash. (Hence the rats.) Every train that passed by threatened to shake that trailer into the junkheap it was always trying to become. At some point in the past, someone had doubled the width of the trailer by adding a flimsy living room and bedroom, making our home "mobile" in name only.

"Indians came in here and did that," explained the ancient owner of the mobile home park, but I don't know what he meant by that and I'm not sure he did either. We did, however, learn some other important things about our little castle, including the fact that our trailer was at the end of the sewer line connecting a whole line of trailers, so if the line backed up anywhere along the way, it would eventually spill under our trailer.

But we had bought the place for a paltry $2500 (partly furnished) so what did we expect? We got our money's worth: we lived there for two years and when we moved out, we took with us all the furniture, including the deep-freeze we're still using today.

We sold our trailer (for $2000!) when I got pregnant because it was too small for the three of us and I didn't really want my infant child to share a bedroom with snakes, chipmunks, rats, and mice. We moved a few doors down to a bigger, newer, non-vermin-infested mobile home and sold our old one to another grad-school couple with two small children and a third one on the way.

After those early experiments in ownership, we waited two decades before finally finding ourselves in the position to buy a house, and now the child who got her start in our first mobile home is looking around for a home of her own. It know it won't be mobile and I hope it won't be infested with vermin, susceptible to sewage spills, or constantly threatening to dissolve into a junkheap--but even if it is, they'll figure out how to deal with those problems or any others that might come up.

Buying a mobile home was our way to survive as starving grad students, but it also provided a real-world education that has served us well over the years. Buying a house will be different kind of experience for my daughter, but one thing is certain: it's bound to provide an education.