Playing "If I Had To Live There"

For lots of years when we'd drive through run-down, depressing neighborhoods, I'd sit in the passenger seat and play the "I Would Never Live There" game. 

A simple game, you just peer at houses with iron bars across the windows and wine bottles, weeds and washing machines in the yard and you wrinkle your nose and thank God you live someplace else. Somewhere nice.

I didn't learn much while playing that game.

But now I play a different, more challenging version. I call it, "If I Had To Live There." 

I play it while strolling down a street nearby, one which once(a friend told me) was a Guinness Book of World Records winner for the U.S. street with the most bars per capita (or whatever). All these years later it has, oh, maybe 5 bars and lots of old, crumbling (and a couple restored) two or three-story houses.

I take morning walks down that street and, instead of playing the ol' "I'd Never Live There" game, I imagine that Tom and I have lost our money and must now run a business on the lower level of whichever house I've chosen that day.

Ambling down the sidewalk and in my mind, I choose the colors and types of flowers I'd plant in the front yard. I paint the house and its trim in my head and try to arrange our current furniture in the rooms which I'm imagining, as well. I list every advantage to living there--lots of those houses have larger backyards than my current one, many houses have more square footage and since they're older, some still might have lovely antique touches, nooks and crannies (the ones which didn't succumb to the almost inevitable 'remuddle,' that is).

And I list ways in which I could carve out a contented, old-fashioned life for Tom and I inside such a house, even if we had little left of what we own now.

I love that game. When it stops raining later today, I just may go traipsing and imagining down that street, playing the game again, for it's a pleasant challenge and I always step away--hopeful--that I could enjoy creating a cozy home in a not-so-cozy place. If I had to.

Besides, seeing potential wherever I look can become one good, comes-in-handy habit. Indeed.




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