The Vintage Reader

I am having the strangest week. Sometime last Saturday I realized that ALL the houses I'm looking at were built since I graduated from college. Which means, essentially, that they are less than 20 years old. I'm not sure I've EVER lived in a house that new, at least, not since I was a small child; my family always lived in Brand New Houses when my father lived with us, because he apparently didn't like to live in any property that anyone else had ever lived in before, but anyone who's read more than two or three posts here knows that I am pretty much the opposite.

I like knowing that other people have lived in my house. I like thinking about who they were, what they did, what their lives were like. I used to like speculating that the people who built my last house, a kit home from the 20s, were people who liked to save money, but still splurged on custom woodwork and windows and lovely stone. That they likely had a nice Irish or Polish girl who took the cable car in every day to help them out with the wee ones and probably the housework as well. That they probably kept a Model T in the strangely narrow, but tall, garage. Perhaps they strolled down the sidewalk, laughed at the house that Frank Lloyd Wright built (which would have been shut up and empty when their house was new, its owners having abandoned it and moved to their country home--also built by FLW), went to the park and paddled in small rickety boats on the lake. I love that stuff.

But the houses I'm looking at now have granite countertops in the kitchen, "media rooms" (or at least game rooms), two-car garages with automatic doors, cultured stone facades, faux-Tudor half-timbers, laminate floors. They have breakfast bars and family rooms and double-paned windows and whirlpool tubs and his-and-hers vanities and dressing rooms. Dressing rooms! Plural! I kid you not! Features that used to be reserved for movie stars and new money are now standard middle-class fare.

And I love them. Some of them are disastrous McMansions, it's true. You can't say what style they are because they aren't any one style; they're a little bit Tudor, a little bit French Country, a tiny bit Georgian Revival, maybe, and oh-so-contemporary too. But those whirlpool tubs and dual vanities, the French doors that go out to an "outdoor kitchen," all the things I've always said I don't need, those symbols of everything that's wrong with the overconsuming 21st-century American culture that calls luxuries "necessities"--I want them. I want a pot-filler (for those of you who don't watch HGTV, a pot-filler is a separate faucet on a hose that is installed over the cooktop so that you can fill pots where they sit instead of having to actually carry them from the sink to the stove). I want a seamless shower. I want professional landscaping and a sprinkler system.

I don't know what's happened to me. I quit recycling when it became evident that the city was never going to actually empty the bin I faithfully put out at the curb every other week (overflowing, of course, since I was accustomed to weekly curbside recycling). I ended my subscription to the newspaper because I couldn't recycle it, and despite my best intentions, I don't read it online, so I have no idea what's going on in my hometown; I kept up with the news more regularly when I didn't live here! Next thing you know, I'll quit listening to NPR and start listening to contemporary country (as opposed to Classic Country, which y'all know I love) and reading Jan Karon and taking advice from Dr. Phil.

Who the hell has taken over my personality? And what did she do with the person who wanted to buy a funky Midtown midcentury modern and decorate it from the best flea market in the country, which I haven't even BEEN to since I moved back here in SEPTEMBER?