Our House

We never really had a song, like so many other couples. Sure, there were songs over the years that were important to us. But it wasn't until the day we bought the house that we really had a song become ours.

We were both city kids, and had spent our lives living in apartments. As Nick neared retirement, he more and more talked about moving out of the city into the country. What he had in mind was something in the backwoods, far from civilization. I held out for a house on a main road: I have too many cousins in New England to play around with getting snowbound in winter. And so, we bought a house, not in the suburbs but in the country, a good two hours from any major city, heck, an hour from any city of any size. The house is not really much larger than the apartment we had lived in for some twenty years, but we have a nice piece of land. Nick didn't have to contemplate a retirement bounded by an apartment and walks to the shopping strip on concrete sidewalks. He gloried in just "walking the land."

But the night we bought the house was just magical. We had no furniture, except for a folding card table, two pool floats, two beach chairs, and a radio. We spent the night in the living room, in front of the fireplace (with no fire, of course) listening to the radio. We had some oldies station on that was reading dedications. One dedication came on, and the DJ read the letter, all about how this man and his wife had finally bought their first house, and it was there first night there, and would the DJ please play the CSN song "Our House."

And so we danced in the living room, and laughed, and cried tears of joy.

You know the funny thing? We have never, since that night 22 years ago, gotten any radio reception in the house without cable. How'd we get it that night? How'd it happen that there was a dedication that perfectly fit us, requesting a song by a band that held particular meaning for us?

Whenever that song comes on now, I relive that night, and laugh and cry some more.