Freesia McKee on “Like Buying a House”

Since I began moving through the world as a young feminist writer, my most important work has involved the act of questioning. I want to shake the foundations, trespass, jump the fence, slide through the smallest casement window and investigate the corners of the basement. I want to see what’s underground. Many of us write against borders, across property lines, violating the gated zoning the sticklers taught us was a given. We write well in places of tension, possibility, and conflict. Our most exciting writing often happens at a precipice.

One of the elemental homes of my poetic imagination is my paternal grandparents’ house, a creaking, antique, four-bedroom Waukesha County farmhouse with a suburb that grew in around it. They lived there for fifty years, and I also lived in the house with my dad on weekends in middle and high school while he cared for his octogenarian father. What I remember best are the layers of stuff that family members had accumulated. It fascinated me: scrapbooks from the 1930s, green fabric from World War II, dusty cigar boxes and old baseballs and antique glass jugs. I spent weekends alone or with my little sister crawling through every room, snooping.

After my grandfather’s death about fifteen years ago, the house was purchased by its municipality and demolished to create a retention pond so the high school parking lot next door would stop flooding. The pond is actually a beautiful marsh with cattails and mallard ducks, sort of a public space we can still visit. The house and its sensory delights still appear often in my dreams, so I suppose I visit that part of my childhood, too. However, the critical consciousness of my adulthood has given me a more complex lens through which to view this essential destination of my personal landscape: the post-WWII homeownership and social stability that led to this house being “in the family” for over fifty years is due to class privilege and white supremacy.

In 2020, my partner Jade and I moved to a small Midwestern town in a neighboring state after she began a tenure-track job at its university. We’d dealt with nasty landlords for the previous several years, but now, we were in a position to buy a house. We’d been able to save money in the last Midwestern town we’d lived, a place with a disturbing social climate but the tradeoff of a very low cost of living.

As two queer Millennial women and itinerant artist-academics without children, we were both different and the same as my paternal grandparents, a homemaker (artist) and salesman (inventor) who raised five children in the 1950s and ‘60s. All four of us white, all four of us in financial positions during our thirties—albeit with seven decades between us—to purchase property with money we both did and did not earn.

“Like Buying a House” maps my thought process as Jade and I began to think about buying a home. Many of the offerings of comfort our society hands us are actually complacency in pretty packaging. This has become increasingly true for me during this first half of my thirties. Every year, my social location offers me more comfort. Every year, these same hands push me towards complacency. Buying a house in this small town seemed possible, even in some ways easy, but what did shaking hands with our unearned social advantage cost us? Every business deal that offers stability seems to have a sinister side.

Was it ethical for us to “own” property? Can you own a house and keep a pretty stable job and maintain a radical politics? In this piece, I’ve tried to write on that edge of my thinking, that border of questioning. And I’ve tried to write also at the border of prose and poetry, the page itself a landscape I want to uncut and de-pipeline, these linguistic bureaucracies and highways I want to re-evaluate as the crow flies.