The house is on fire—it’s a big house, at least three stories. In this recurring dream, the attic is filled with furniture and other valuables I must rescue before the house burns to the ground. Sometimes to save what's trapped in the attic I must squeeze myself through a tiny scuttlehole. I always wake up too soon.

I'VE LIVED IN many, many houses, rooms, apartments.  They seem countless, but they're not because I just made a list.  Like the list of lovers I made once, it wasn't a straight line . . . there were those I forgot and only in the middle remembered and had to squeeze in—oh, yes, Maple Street and the garage apartment on Fairfield.

In the first house, I'm a fat baby, and all I remember is flashes. Seeing the shadows cross my bedroom wall as cars drove by at night, growing big enough to walk and feed lettuce to the turtle in his galvanized tub.

The next house, a brand-new barn-red split level.  I rubbed pink, fluffy fiberglass insulation on my chin, so pretty, suffering later.  I cried when my room was pink, not red as promised--my mother explaining, well pink is a kind of red. Living there long enough for sleepovers and a clock radio and sneaking out of the house at night.

Then my parents moved away and I didn't, and a little room in my best friend's family's house, with an accordion door and sequined stars and moons pasted up all over the ceiling. I brought just what would fit in a big green trunk--my quilt, my clothing, my books--things that would travel with me from that point on.

Apartment 13 in a big brick Victorian, a rabbit warren of odd rooms with strange plumbing, sinks in showers, all of us young and loving each other like siblings and sometimes like lovers (and sixtycandles a flight up in the tower apartment, with her collection of True Love and Zap).

Following boyfriends is where it gets hard to remember:  A gray apartment complex at the west of town, a house in a town further west, then Waco of all places and Peoria, back to the Victorian, a house with my friend again and her sister and brother in law and the miraculous dog Fu, the garage apartment complete with peeping Tom, a coop in a cornfield, others, more . . .  they’re all on the list, written small in the margin.

Then packing my Datsun to the gills, loading the green trunk on top and lashing my 10-speed to the back, on the way to Arkansas. Living in a basement apartment with a gas heater, above me my lesbian landladies, chain-smoking and sipping Old Milwaukee tall boys. There learning to teach and write poetry and . . . what else? When it’s time to move again, I guess.

Back to my hometown and to another apartment, where the man who would be my husband and I slept in a single bed, comfortably, not tossing or turning for once. And our first house, tiny, a lot like the house with the turtle in his galvanized tub, not far from there really, and a first baby, a girl.

Then another baby, a boy, and a divorce, then the house where I live now, the biggest house ever, a palace my father called it, and my kids with backpacks walking to school but growing larger and more powerful and needing me less, maybe not at all.  Soon both of them will be gone, and then I'll be an old lady in a big house, like Sophie across the street, whom I love, but I just don't want that for myself.

So I dream of a smaller  house, not too far from here but not too close to the barn-red split level either because that just doesn't feel right. Not three stories, on fire, with too many valuable things in a place I can’t reach, but one story, with a flat roof and a windowed courtyard and only the things I choose to love.

 Next: The Piece of Crap House I Want to Buy