We whipped through the fantasy as we always do in January. The detached home. The place of our own. The place we can own, just us. The ground would be ours. There would be no one else. Between walls would be air and grasses and lilies of the valley, and we would have an enormous vegetable garden and a garage for doing work in. And the girls would have their own rooms, a room of their own, and walls between them, and no one else to infringe on whatever we wanted to do, whenever we felt like it, within the limits of the law.

We looked through the MLS and we gazed and dreamed. We looked at the places we can’t afford and we looked at the gardens already built and the walls already painted, the awful appliances and the narrow old windows. We looked at the places we could afford, to achieve our dream of independence. And then we looked at our own little place and said “well… if we stay here for another few years…”

And we said “we like this little place” and our justifications weigh out far heavier to stay with just under 200 square feet per person, to keep the carbon footprint small, to enjoy the control and support of our strata, to take our little garden with its vegetable yield and the little apple tree for what it all is: just the right size for right now.

And so the dream of home is detached from the physical house. The reality of home is detached from the walls and it lives in our walking patterns through this well-laid-out suite, the sight-lines of privacy and openness, and our huge 1970s size windows that let the south sun in summer. Here we live within our means, and this living is good enough for us.