I just got back from moving heavy wooden furniture into my cousins' new house. I'm not going to speculate much about why they seem to need heavy wooden furniture (rather than, say, cheap plastic shit or something modern like that), but I think there is a need for permanence in the whole thing. While you could take a baseball bat to the stuff and, after a lot of hitting, break it all down to smaller pieces of broken wood, this furniture is sturdy. It's not going anywhere. And I don't really want to move it again anytime soon.

A few of my friends bought new houses in the last month or so. Summer madness, I guess. Of course, none of the houses are actually "new." They are new to my friends (and me), but not new in the sense that they just popped out of the house factory.

I've lived in only one completely new house in my life. My family bought an eight acre corner of Clovis, NM (it actually was bordered on two sides by the city limits) and set out to build an oasis in the desert. First, they put in a well (for "free" water the garden and feed the trees which eventually lined the edges of our land), then came the barn. It was one of those Durabuilt type of things. A big red barn in the middle of nowhere. We moved into the barn before the house was started.

It took at least a year to put the behemoth of a house up. My younger brother and I lived in the barn for a couple of years before we finished our rooms in the house. The two of us were the first to live in the house. The first spring we lived there it was infested with moths. A half hour before bed was usually spent killing off scores of those flying freaks. The house itself could fill a book--and it's kind of interesting that none of my family has actually written a novel about the place. I'll just say the place was huge, eclectic and we never finished it.

My cousins bought a house that reminded me of my Clovis "childhood" home. It was built by a family. The father was good with metal and constructed the place on steel beams with concrete block walls. It is completely unique in that no sensible contractor would design anything like it. It was built in the early 60s, and, with the Cold War paranoia in full effect, it has a fall out shelter underneath part of the backyard. Interestingly, a photo book of the construction and blueprints came with the place. Looking through the book, I wondered why the family didn't keep the photos.

But then I thought maybe the family had the same bittersweet memories of the house. Something that was a "dream house" in all respects, but eventually fell short of the dream for one reason or another. I doubt of any of them wrote the story of their house, even if one or more might have thought about doing it.

I grew up working on houses. Since I was about six years old, we were always living in a house where things needed to be done. I stripped wallpaper, sanded baseboards, painted and stained walls and wood. At our dream house in Clovis, I probably painted or stained almost every room at least two times (some I did more, some I didn't do at all, so that's just an estimate).

My younger brother and I have the same point of view about home improvement: I've done enough for the rest of my life. Which is why we've been renting forever. We don't have to fix things when they break. We just call up the landlord, and he works it out. Eventually, I'm sure this will change. But even the surge in home ownership among friends isn't really swaying my view much.

But as I rested after carrying the heavy wood, I could see why so many want something to call their own. It's a lot like having a heavy piece of furniture. It means there is a solid center to all the swirls of life.

An oasis in the desert, if you will.

Matt Worley had to repaint many walls in Clovis because his younger brother threw a party for the entire high school--and some of them felt like throwing jungle juice on the walls.