One reluctant homeowner?s journey into the heart of darkness: a Benjamin Moore paint color wheel You have to understand that I was never going to have a home. You have to understand that I spent my adulthood seated at dinner tables, fashioning a neutral and blithely interested face for myself as other adults who were renovating houses they had purchased discussed fixtures and permits and contractors. You have to understand that I had chosen a career and a life and a location that would ensure that I never owned a house, and so this information swirled around me but didn?t involve me.

You have to understand that I was at peace with this?that the other people at the table, the other people on the earth, they were all lawyers and hedge fund managers and compliance officers and marketers, and all those lives sounded like fates worse than actual death, and so the price I paid was to be a perpetual renter?to not have a right and true stake in the world. You have to understand that to be at peace about never owning a home is a hard-won thing in this country, where the economy collapsed because others couldn?t accept that they were like me, which is to say broke, and I had a lot of pride in my acceptance of our financial situation. You have to understand how I convinced myself that there was freedom in never having to make these decisions. "Look, Claude," I said to my husband, "We?re so lucky we can pack up and leave to, I don?t know, live in France for a year...