Dedicated readers may remember the Great House Hunt of 2022, which took months and months and many rejected offers before I finally sealed a deal. 

This time we did it in three weeks. 

I’m serious. From the day our real estate agent first came to meet me to the day the offer was accepted, only three weeks passed.

To be fair, it felt like a lot longer; living with an infant causes weird time dilation. Plus, my brain is still basically cottage cheese. On the day we met our real estate agent for the first time, I accidentally arranged for the agent, my brother and my dog walker to all show up at my house at 11 a.m., and all of them arrived promptly. You can imagine the chaos that ensued. 

I had prepared my wife for a long and grueling process because that was the whole of my home buying experience, but we found our new family home on day one.

It was the Goldilocks experience of house tours: the first one was too small, the second one had a tiny and very weirdly shaped yard (think a drunk tetragon), and the third one — well. I saw the look on my wife’s face when she pulled the 1950s built-in spice cabinet that slides out of the wall and knew we were home. 

It’s a mid-century Cape, which means it’s pretty modern by Maine standards. It has lots of character, and I don’t just mean “character” in the way that sometimes means “a very pretty money pit.” I mean a fireplace and a cute sunroom and so many built-ins, including a minifridge nook under the staircase, which is absolutely going to be my dedicated seltzer fridge.

There’s a yard with established gardens and my wife has promised I can put a fenced area for the dogs. There is also a Virgin Mary statue in a little rock grotto that is probably too heavy to move so … character! It’s not perfect. The roof will need to be replaced in a few years, but it’s in pretty good shape considering our budget, and there were no nasty inspection surprises such as “oops, the septic tank is full of roots,” something which happened with my first house. 

It’s in a residential Lewiston neighborhood, with lots of sidewalks and dead-end streets; perfect for walking old, slow dogs and a baby in a stroller. We picked Lewiston deliberately, we didn’t just end up there, and we picked the city for two main reasons. One, there’s enough housing stock there that a middle-class couple with a baby can afford a house. Lewiston is also centrally located to a lot of places we need to go. Plus, with a baby, we wanted to be less than 10 minutes away from a hospital or grocery store. (You know, the necessities.) 

The second is the same reason the federal government recently targeted Lewiston — it’s a large (for Maine), diverse community, with a mixture of residents from different places. And let me tell you, it’s a weird time to be moving there, wondering if masked, armed men are going to be snatching people out of cars while I’m getting the mail.

Lewiston has a bit of a reputation. It’s not a wealthy town and it has a large Black population, which makes a lot of white Mainers a bit nervous and prejudicial, whether or not they are willing to admit it. A lot of people give you the side-eye when you say you’re moving there, or they worry about crime. The crime rate has been falling for years, by the way.

Not to mention that the Somali-American community has become a new right-wing scapegoat, here in Maine and all across the country. But for me, the Somali community is a big draw to Lewiston. I want to be surrounded by hardworking, family-oriented folks. As my son was growing inside me, we were both nourished with food grown by Somali farmers. (Another bonus of the move is that farmers markets will now be much closer!) 

I want Sonny to grow up in a place with lots of young people his age, in thriving school classrooms with students from different backgrounds and life experiences. If he gets into sports, I really want him to get into soccer, because there’s much less chance of concussion, not to mention you don’t have to buy that much equipment for it.

I want him to be unafraid of people who look, think and believe differently than him. To grow up in a place where he can walk to a friend’s house or to the corner store. 

But first I have to pack up this whole house into boxes, which is surprisingly difficult to do with an infant, two dogs who still have a taste for cardboard and a particularly curious cat.