Let’s start this off with an understanding: I am not an acquisitive person. I’m still using the pots and pans I bought when I moved into my first college apartment. I have one purse, which I will replace, when it wears out in 10 years or so, with one more.  I don’t own a television set, a stereo or a single diamond. I don’t like to shop, not at Walmart, not at the mall, not online.  I am almost completely indifferent to material possessions.

I’m also not house-proud. We have lived for a quarter-century and raised a herd of children (yes, I said “herd,” and they were a thundering herd indeed) in a 100-year-old 1,700-square foot home that, for most of those years, had only one bathroom.  We bought it very cheap and we’ve never been sufficiently motivated to trade up. It wears its scars proudly, which is a very good thing. The landscaping has been heavily influenced by children wielding kitchen utensils. I could live here comfortably until I die. I probably will.

But here’s the confession: I covet a second home.

My road to covetousness was a slippery slope indeed.  A family member — or rather an entire family of them, it was the children we wanted to help — tripped over his own baggage, fell into hard times and called asking for money. It wasn’t a large amount in our scheme of things, because we had grown accustomed to writing five-figure tuition checks, and we agreed almost without comment. Still, he had some pride, and he offered to sell us, for that amount, a piece of land he owned.

I began to consider whether I might someday want a house “back home.”

The house that sat on our new land, however, did not meet our minimum standards, those being a roof, four walls and indoor plumbing. The land was gorgeous, with a creek and trees on one side and long views on the other, and we talked for a while about renovating, but one of our sons summed up the prospect best when he commented, “I have an explosives license.” We burned the house and outbuildings and called the junk man to haul off many tons of metal; then we leased the land and water to the neighbor (which is what our relative should have done in the first place).

But the idea of a prairie home hasn’t gone away.

A couple months ago, in the middle of the night, an early winter storm blew in, hurling sleet against the side of the house, screaming past the ponderosa that grows outside our bedroom window. We get wind here a few times a year; Kansas gets a few days a year without it. Awakened from a sound sleep under my down comforter, for just a moment I thought I was home.

I thought I was home.

“So buy a house,” my husband said when I tried to describe the longing that experience engendered, and I began that day to browse what he calls my real-estate porn. It didn’t take long to find a house I liked, in a place I wanted to live, for a price we can afford.

Real estate on the Buffalo Commons can be had for a song because so few people can make a living there. Hardly anyone (with the possible exception of Nanatehay) would want to try. That makes such real estate a foolhardy investment, and other arguments against the move abound, from chiggers to tornadoes.  It’s a long day’s drive from here, dawn to dark of a long summer day.  We have a perfectly good house here, in a place where people really do want to live, with a nice view of the mountains. We aren’t anywhere near ready to retire, and even now, I’m nothing like the girl I remember being in that country.

But oh, I ache for it.

I took one of my daughters and went to look at the house. I told her I’d be spending part of her inheritance, probably a part she could never recoup. She’s a sane child, one upon whom I can depend to point out the flaws in my plans. “Mom,” I expected her to say in that tone adult children use with their slightly addled parents, “the stairs are steep and the rooms are tiny. The nearest town doesn’t have a doctor; it doesn’t even have a grocery store. What are you thinking?”

She flattened her hand on the sun-warmed stone and was enchanted. “Buy it,” she said. “Buy it now.”

Of course, nothing is quite that easy. The price, while very low, is still too high for the value. The sellers are willing to deal; their banker, naturally, is not, and I, a Christian minister, am deeply ambivalent about pushing for a short sale. On one hand, three people have looked at the house in the three years it’s been on the market. I may be their only opportunity to sell it, perhaps ever.  The landscape is peppered with abandoned homesteads. On the other hand, should I be a party to the real estate collapse?  Or should I let it collapse without me? I certainly can't stop it. With so many serious needs in the world, should I even be entertaining the idea of another home, however modest?

Partly, it’s an exit strategy. The place we currently live is leaning into an energy boom, and we don’t want to be a part of that.  When it comes, we’ll hold out for a couple years, until prices are driven as high as they’re likely to go, and then we’ll sell out and leave. In the Midwest, we’d own the mineral rights to our acreage, not that it will ever matter. We’d be as assured as anyone can ever be that no one will build a McMansion just across the property line. We’d have a windmill (that moaned constantly) and a garden (decimated by grasshoppers), a barn (pushed well off kilter by 120 years of ceaseless wind), a (smelly) chickenhouse turned into a greenhouse (or a meth shed in our absence). We’d have the worry of finding someone trustworthy to look after it. We aren’t interested in farming, even on shares.

See how the arguments go? Then they circle back around to the one true thing: I want to go home, or at least I want to be able to go home. My bones, my blood, my soul want that house.