We called our cousins telling them that we would host them for the holidays, and that our new house had enough beds that no one would need to sleep on the floor. We actually believed those walls would house us. If you think about something often and hard enough, it eventually calcifies into a belief that it is already yours. And in 2006, the Dream Home was located just outside of Asheville, North Carolina, where my mother’s joints would not rebel and purple and my father wouldn’t sweat through his shirts year-round. My mother grew up in South Florida, never more than thirty minutes away from the Atlantic Ocean her comfort depended on air grown thick with humidity and salt. You see, my father grew up in the Midwest, where one summer I passed out from heat exhaustion, waking with orbs in my vision in another season, I had to thaw my toes after walking through the snow in sneakers. We tuned in for every episode, where architects and designers would beam at their hard work, the camera sweeping over bathrooms and zooming in over the faucets and the showerheads, everything opulent and mother-of-pearl shiny. For years, every day we could, we entered the annual sweepstakes. There was one thing my entire family dreamed of, and that was winning HGTV’s Dream Home. An interior decorator says, “Welcome to your HGTV Dream Home!” But the couple is too hysterical to hear much else. They too fall to their knees in front of the home. The film crew zooms in on their hands clasped together-before the hands separate and are brought in front of their mouths. The architect says, “Welcome to your HGTV Dream Home!” And the mother folds in half in the circular driveway. An architect and two designers welcome the family to a house of wood and stone. There is a mother, a father, and a pair of boys with freckles on sunburned cheeks-or perhaps just flush with excitement. A minivan opens to let out a family of four.
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