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My mom calls me. She has found a house on Zillow. It has all the extravagant, absolutely necessary fixtures of suburbia: a three-car garage, central air, four bedrooms, two bathrooms, and twenty-foot ceilings.

If my brothers and I used our money for a mortgage instead of rent, she says, we could live there together. She wants to move to a bigger house. I think that we have too much stuff, but she would rather expand the container than shear down the contents.



She moved us from our small town house in Philadelphia to the three-bedroom split-level in the suburbs we lived in for the bulk of my childhood. The current house sits on a steep hill, sheathed in vinyl siding the color of butter. It has box-cutter hedges and blue shutters, and a patio—a middle-class mirage my parents saved up for.

“You have to climb the rungs when you can,” my mom continues over the phone. I imagine the rungs she describes as a ladder submerged in a grain silo filled with water. As she monitors the water’s rise from her raft, our current house, she eyes the next rung: higher, drier, safer.

This rung would have a house with high ceilings and two staircases, rooms for all of us even if we are old enough to live elsewhere now. “We want to set you all up for when we’re gone,” she says. “But maybe I won’t get to live in a house with high ceilings until my next life.

” Somehow, with talk of houses, we always come back to the subject of death. * When the pandemic began in 2020, I moved back .

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