by Mark Zeiger

Created on: March 07, 2009

I have always been fascinated by "moments," those instances in life where we face something that will have great impact on our lives. Most of the time we don't know that life will become entangled with this thing at that particular moment. We may see a person who will later become our spouse. We might hear of a tropical storm developing that will soon grow to a hurricane that will devastate the Gulf Coast. A Realtor eventually shows us the house that will become our home.

This last one held my attention particularly fifteen years ago as we toured homes for sale, looking for the right one for us. The evaluation process was as exhilarating as it was emotionally draining. Each new house brought the same questions: Will my family be happy here? Does it have everything we need in a home? Can we improve or overlook its shortcomings? What will it be like ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? The very serious game of "What If?" played out again and again in our minds. Each time I wondered if this was, indeed, our new home?

The game we played was for high stakes. More was at stake than the daunting cost and the idea of committing to thirty years of debt. We had embarked on this venture at a pivotal moment in our lives.

I made my living in radio, so My wife and I lived like Gypsies. We had been married for ten years at that point, during which we had moved thirteen times. We hoped to add one more move to that tally, and be done.

The uncertainties of my employment forced us to rent. We banished thoughts of home buying, especially since some of the towns my work took us to did not satisfy us enough to want to put down roots, even if we could do so.

These uncertainties also led us to put off starting our family. We wisely postponed both home buying and children until we found a place we wanted to call home, and a job in which I felt secure enough to risk starting a family.

That's why we found ourselves house hunting while my wife was nine months pregnant. This added a sobering urgency to settling on the right house. Factoring in the need to satisfy a member of the family we literally had not met yet complicated the process. Our future hung in the balance in two very critical ways.

My wife knew we'd found our home the moment she saw it. I felt no such certainty. It was a cute house in an excellent neighborhood, but it had quirks. For instance, the open floor plan had been sectioned strangely, giving it two separate living rooms, both of which were long and narrow. That and other problems, large and small, made me cautious and pessimistic.

We first saw the house on a late, sunny afternoon as long shadows from the surrounding greenbelt deepened. It enchanted my wife, but left me skeptical. I could not see myself living there at all. Thankfully, she could.

We discussed it long and hard, finally agreeing to tender an offer. We arranged for early occupancy and moved in with our ten-day-old daughter. Perhaps because she grew up there, accepting all the house's oddities as normal, as "Home," it soon became my home as well.

The story did not end there, of course. Within three months I got laid off from my "steady employment." We struggled, but persevered. Eventually, we would sell that home for a new one. Where the story goes from there is not yet possible to tell.

Many times, in the years we lived in that house, I would walk out to the curb and stand looking back at it. Particularly on those evenings when the late afternoon shadows deepened, I would gaze at the house and remember that first time I saw it. I found it odd to think that I could not see that first time, as I could now so clearly see, that it truly was home.

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