House for sale! House for sale!

Heavily used. Every room has been wept in, laughed in, or at some point lightly glazed with bodily fluids. Yes, even the insides of the closets. Admire the resulting patina, yours for a pittance! (Not really. The west coast is pricier than west Texas, so ante up.)

Points of interest include: lots of storage. The insides of the aforementioned closets are seeing the light of day for the first time in decades. Immediately prior to you coming here, they held boxes of newspaper clippings, kid art, and maps of every square inch of the state of Texas, now opened, breathed in, raked through, then reboxed, recycled, or dragged to the curb.

Stacks of maps of Big Bend and the Chisos Mountains, the notes from our births at the hospital, an ancient Willie Nelson poster, boxes upon boxes of newspaper columns, dozens of half-written notes on the backs of envelopes, many of which I, very much my father's daughter, tucked away surreptitiously to take home and hide in my attic in Oregon. I found two of my baby teeth in an envelope addressed to the tooth fairy, clearly waylaid by Dad.

The backyard: I know, you're going to look at it and think, I don't have time to mow all this. So don't! Do what we did: build a sandbox, and two treehouses, and put in a huge fabulous aboveground pool, perfect for cannonballs as long as you are under four and a half feet tall, and a deck for stargazing. Put in a stage and have all your friends over to sing songs and recite poetry and short stories in exchange for unconditional high regard and free beer. Put in a chicken coop and three chickens, because your daughter worked on a farm one summer in her early twenties and now is snobbish about egg quality, and watch as the grass disappears by the beakful.

Other points of interest: the weird trapdoor inside one of the closets that leads outside, perfect for a Halloween haunted house scavenger hunt; a beautiful hand-built wooden wardrobe upstairs that Mom risked her very life to finish sanding as the Storm of '95 descended upon us, tornado sirens wailing; the basement, where we fled for that and many other storms. Though once, after Mom and Dad had sent us down to the basement while they "monitored the storm" from upstairs, I came up after thirty minutes and found them laughing and sharing beers at the dining room table.

Bonus: the ceramics studio out back, which I converted in my mid-twenties into an art refuge at a time when I badly needed one. The wall has "never be less than your dreams" stamped on it, which you, dear house viewer, will think is cheesy because you don't know that I saw a fortune cookie with that phrase right as I was finishing nursing school and felt very, very far from any dreams at all. You will paint over it, as is your right, but it will stay right there regardless, radiating its protection over you the same way countless things in these walls I never knew about have done the same for us over our thirty years here.

Other bonus: the garage apartment. This was the place I fled to from the world. This was my home when I couldn't even imagine how to make one of my own, a borrowed place where I belonged absolutely, the place where I am typing this now. Don't tell my mom, but this is the first place I kissed a boy.

Tally of animals buried in the backyard that I know of: One three-legged dog, two dogs with the normal amount of legs, one parakeet, two cats, countless squirrels.

Here is what I need to say, dear house viewer, even if you have no need to hear it while you open closet doors and contemplate bathroom remodels: This house is at the very root of my being. I left it for a place I love with all my heart, but a substantial part of my soul will stay here, in the staggering August heat, surrounded by a cacophony of cicadas, hearing the echoes of children who are long grown laughing and dousing each other underwater, listening one more time to my father read The Luckenbach Moon at the opening of another Club Sandwich, spinning one of thousands of stories with my sister in the backyard.

It will stay here and read books on the brick porch when the breeze is just so. It will watch my mother lope in large circles inside the pool on hot summer evenings, first one way, than the opposite direction, meditative as a monk while my sister and I float behind in her slipstream. It will bound through the hallway as one or another family member comes through the back door and calls Helloooo! in our family's sweet yodeling cadence. It will canoe the warm murk of the Concho by way of Christoval and tap her foot to the Chicken Pickers at the Old Chicken Farm Art Center.

It will walk the streets of the tree-lined neighborhood with my mother, talking about anything and everything. It will bury its face in the sun-warmed buttoned-up shirt of my father, who smells like ink and Texas sun and the tang of sweat. It will walk to Mr. T's with a gang of young girls, laughing and looking out of the sides of our eyes for cute boys on bikes, who ignore us as a a matter of course. It will perch long-limbed on the counter at J. Wilde's, jotting in a notebook in a rare moment when the store is empty and the heat radiates off the blacktop outside.

I took the two teeth, so tiny that I can't imagine a time when they were a part of me, and walked to the maple tree where Mom's dog Eleanor is buried. I dug a hole and dropped them in, her beloved bones close to mine, so part of me would always be here.

No extra charge.

House for sale, larger than life, with good bones and some extra tears glazing the garage apartment.

House for sale.