The Lemony Snicket's House

When I want to change my life, I shop. Except I don't look at shoes or clothes. Oh, no. I buy houses. I move.

It is time.

My sister says it's because, growing up in the suburbs of Dayton, we wished we lived anywhere else. Somehow the white-breaded Brady-world we lived in inked a "get me outta here" tattoo on our psyches. She moves a lot too. She calls it "geographic bulimia." Says she can't stomach one place for too long. She doesn't buy and sell houses, though. She changes countries. This weekend, she bought the plane ticket to Thailand. She's moving there on New Year's Day. Until then, she's leaving Barcelona, where she's lived for the past year, for a small town in France where she'll work on her novel.

Me? I'm just looking at a different part of Jersey City. Because I can't think of anywhere else to go. I've started doing my middle of the night "well, I can't sleep so I guess I'll drive around looking at houses" manuevers again. That's how I found this house I am sitting in, two and a half years ago. I drove past it and said, "That's the one."

It's a fine house. But I've never been in love with it. It's an investment, and I think the market's peaked. Time to sell. Buy something cheaper, smaller.

Yesterday, I drove past the house I want now. The Lemony Snicket's house.

That's not what the realtor calls it, but that's what it is.

It's perched on a cliff, facing Manhattan. It's the weirdest street, somehow, in an urban area but practically deserted. What buildings are there are derelict. A few vacant lots filled with broken furniture. It's not pretty.

But there's this ramshackle house, all by itself, sitting on a hill just above the cliff. It's a side-by-side two-family. Half of it is boarded up. The other half is for sale. Cheap. (Well, it would have to be, wouldn't it?)

When I saw it, I pulled the car over to the side of the road, at the edge of the cliff overlooking Manhattan. I sat there, like at Wimbledon, looking from side to side-- rickety, sloping Lemony Snicket's house to the left. Manhattan skyline to the right. I sighed. It's perfect. And who would live there but me?

I can't wait to see the inside. I hope the stairs wheeze when you walk on them. I hope you can roll a marble across the kitchen floor. I hope that when the light backs in over the afternoon, it casts long shadows and eerie beams to catch dustmotes that will dance for me as I look out over the Chryler building.

And I hope the boarded up half is drowning in back taxes so I can buy it too, get it zoned commercial and open an artsy cafe with outdoor tables in the summer in what is now the trash-filled vacant lot.

It will need mega-work. But it's so gothic (and so cheap) that I can't imagine not at least bidding on it.

And with that view. Amazing.

So I am house hunting again. And autumn tugs at my sleeve. "Find your way, Cupcake," it whispers. "Find your way home." I keep looking. Like the Baudelaire children, I keep looking.

Maybe this is the one.

("Who has no house now never will have one.
Who is alone will stay alone.
Will sit, read, write long letters through the evening.
And wander the boulevards, hither and yon, restlessly
while the dry leaves are blowing.")