The house that Fredd-n-Vic bought

At night, it’s so quiet inside our new house. I feel my feet touching the carpet in the hallway but I can’t hear the steps. Only the whirring fans and single cricket practicing his wings at full volume are audible.

Outside, the full moon whitens legions of weeds advancing on scarce blades of grass. The rickety brown fence boards are chrome-plated in the light. And the man-made-of-cheese notes my lack of progress on the “gardens."

By the time we sold our little house on K Street back home in Tacoma, we had eight gardens. Now, I can’t even get hold of the two that came along with the transom windows and red brick fireplace (thankfully painted white now) in Reseda. I am forgetting that it took four years to grow those Tacoma gardens. At their heights, they couldn’t support one healthy rose like the three I've inherited. The tender green leaves succumbing to the ever-present Black Spot mildew. Here, the roses persist despite my ignorance. Must be all the glamour in the air.

It’s still hard to believe we own this place. It’s wonderful every time I convince myself it's true. It’s the opposite of when my mom died. I would think to phone her and in the next breath remember she wasn’t taking any more calls. Here I wake-up in the new place, inhale, and this is still our house. We don’t have to look for another apartment with a move-in special or underground parking. We have a garage! So worth it.

Reseda is far away from work for both Fredd and I. On the drive out here for the first time full-on doubting our dreams of homeownership, our transportation strategies were created. Fredd would drive me to the bus stop and I would take the Orange Line to NoHo and transfer to the Burbank Blue Bus. Let’s just say it’s one thing to propose a solution, and quite another to drag your ass to the hub to act it out. Fredd drives two hours a day back and forth to his work through beautiful Topanga Canyon and down the beach on PCH, totally worth it.

The mortgage payment shreds our paychecks. We knew what we were getting into. We asked ourselves, "If not now, when?" It was a buyer’s market and interest rates were super low. Now that we’ve actually paid one payment, we’re getting remedial lessons on wants vs. needs. I want a table and chairs, a couple of bedroom sets, a kitchen remodel, a new shovel (Fredd tore our metal spade pulling a cement molar out of the rock-hard front yard). Realistically, I see a new shovel, and maybe a small pitch fork in my immediate future.

October is upon us and I think we have some Halloween decorations in a plastic tub somewhere to put up. What I am really looking forward to is the smell of a Christmas tree, and the taste of fresh baked gingerbread made so much sweeter by rising in our very own oven.

The yard will keep, the busses are going to keep rolling me back and forth to work in Burbank, and Fredd is getting lots of reading done while waiting for his wife and her little dog at the Park‘n’Ride. Moving out here has changed our view so drastically that it’s going to take some time to adjust. Exchanging our old apartment neighbor's crap music for cricket songs is going to make it a lot easier.