Melba Burns did not mean to buy the boxy old farmhouse on one-quarter acre in the worst neighborhood in Portland. She’d simply driven down Simpson Street ogling its tall trees and seen the For Sale by Owner sign and stopped. Wading through shin-high grass, Melba laughed. The dirty windows. The gabled roof. She felt the tilting rush the ocean gives when tides are going out, taking your footing with them, and life seems stupendously fine. Melba turned, attempting professional distance. She tried the garage door—unlocked, with pegboard walls painted emerald green—and everything she saw silenced her: the raspberries pushing up through the cracked foundation, the faltering shed, the soaked firewood, the neglected grace of the two barn-high apple trees in back. Melba breathed awhile surveying the flat weedy parcel. It began to rain. It was lunatic to believe a property actually needed you. But when she hoisted her small body up onto the gas meter and peered into the house—

Quilt block floors in ruddy fir.

Blown glass windows.

A twelve-pane door.

Knee walls. And nine foot ceilings.

Melba called the owner, who told her to help herself to the key under the mat. “But be quick about it,” he said. “I got two low-ball offers. Gonna sell tonight. You don’t got a real estate agent, do you?”

“Gracious, no,” Melba said. She was a real estate agent, one of Oregon’s best.

The rooms downstairs needed paint--one small bedroom, a bathroom, no closet. The kitchen window had a view of nothing in particular, weeds and grass and chain link fence, the sort of vista only country life could afford. Melba’s heart compressed a little in anticipation as she climbed the steep stairs. Two attic bedrooms, north and south. You could see Mount Saint Helens in the distance, over the top of the giant rhododendron tree in front. Melba tugged the window open and leaned out. She was a girl again. Her bedroom window in Murray, Utah had had a view of the Wasatch Mountains, in an attic with slanted ceilings just like these. Flowered wallpaper. A chamber pot. The Mormon girl in Melba, the calm dependable sunny child she’d been and betrayed and then abandoned thirty years ago, said, “Well, then.”

Melba wrote her offer inside the Volvo, sweaty as a kid bearing her testimony in church. She knew her business partners would be appalled. Her friend Ellie would laugh out loud. The move would uproot her urban life, gut her grueling work schedule. Somehow that was the beauty of it.

So Melba Burns—a highly realized woman of independent means--stood on the broad front porch with the spider nests and squashed newspapers looking at the neighbor’s tarped RV, feeling both dizzy and drunk. An idiot might have resisted. Melba knew houses. This house chose her. This house and these neglected grounds.

A February rain wetted the gravel drive. The lace cap hydrangeas needed thinning. It would take years to set the garden right. Thank God for time.