Homing Instinct
Some of you reading this may have cherished (or not-so-cherished) memories of your home-away-from-home in Morgantown. Maybe the cool tile floor of your residence hall room comes to mind whenever you walk barefoot across the polished marble in your Fifth Avenue condo. Or, whenever you sit down to a meal of grilled swordfish at your favorite oceanfront restaurant in South Beach, your olfactory nerves are revisited by the aroma of an open can of tuna leaking its juices on the warped countertop in your Sunnyside apartment.
Believe it or not, there are those of us for whom Morgantown is home 365 days a year, every year. Our lives, while affected seriously by the academic calendar at WVU, do not revolve around it. There is no two-month summer vacation in the Outer Banks for us, no six-week sojourn across Europe in June and July. We live here, in Morgantown. This is home.
Once a particular place becomes your home, you have to find a domicile, a residence—a house. If you're not financially established, or if your work requires frequent relocation, it may be suitable simply to rent. But the instinct to live in one's own nest is powerful, not to mention tax-advantaged. This is why real estate agents were invented. To help formerly migratory people find nests.
This summer, with the help of a friendly agent from one of the local real estate agencies, my wife and I travelled the length, breadth, and heights of Morgantown searching for a house to buy.
The first house we looked at, a 1960s-era ranch house in the Wiles Hill neighborhood, was wedged into a pocket of land between—and below—the two houses adjacent to it. The effect, in my view, was like a family portrait with the two parents seated behind their small child, who looks a bit uneasy about being in such an exposed and vulnerable position. Nope, we told the agent. Not this one.
"You'll have to get out of city limits if you want something off by itself," he explained. The next house, south of town off the Grafton Road, was a battleship-grey contemporary with an entry door on the left side and a couple of portholes in the short wall above. The yard was very flat, though not very green due to the summer's drought. Kind of-grey. But otherwise, this was much more the setting my wife and I had envisioned for our new home.
Hopes rising, we opened the front door and went in. "The previous owners once lived in Arizona," explained our agent. "So they decorated in Southwestern colors." Now, there was the understatement of the month. One living room wall painted sunflower-yellow; each of the three adjoining walls painted turquoise, ocher, or vermillion. Pink ceramic tiles around the fireplace. A mauve commode in the half bath off the foyer. And, around the corner, a mirrored dining room with walls and ceiling reflecting our images to infinity.
As our experience shows, searching for a house to buy is an inexact science. You can tell the agent all sorts of specific details about wants and don't-wants, dream any dreams you want to about the private castle that one day will be yours, and still you will be shown the same weirdly situated, interestingly constructed, oddly decorated houses that other people have decided to leave behind.
And, though you could probably tell a similar story about any number of communities around the country, I suspect there may be more interpretations of a personal "almost heaven" around Morgantown than there are in the world's less wild, less wonderful places.
Come spring, maybe we'll build our own.
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