Julie Pippert: Using My Words

The other day I was looking at this gorgeous house. It was my ideal sort of house: sort of large and rambly, older but fully restored with the same character and time period architecture, a flowy floor plan but with a fair amount of openness, and lovely furnishings...just nice enough to be nice but not at all out of a catalog or showroom. Homey. Classy. Clean. Lovely. All of the sudden, with a hitch to my stomach, I thought, "I am just never, ever going to have a house like this." For a second, I mourned. I am never going to have a house like that because my husband is an architect and I am a writer, and we will likely never make That Amount of Money necessary. I am never going to have a house like that because my husband is an architect in the same way a doctor is a doctor and a plumber is a plumber: they do grand work for everyone except themselves. I am never going to have a house like that because I am Decoration and Flair challenged. I even once took a couple of courses ...

Cheap. As Americans, we like our things. Boy, do we like our things. We like our little impulse buys and we like our big luxuries. But we want it affordable. So we've moved from a culture of craftsmanship to a culture of mass production. This isn't limited to products, either. It extends all the way to customer service, too. My mind started down this path a while back, but it began honing in on the topic late last week. A week ago, my husband and I took a long weekend getaway to a little resort within driving distance. It was our anniversary trip, and we'd planned it long before the other travel came up. While there, we chatted with a man who asked where we lived. We told him and he asked if we were "from there." My husband said yes, I said no, and somehow within a few minutes he was telling us he'd moved from Maine around the same time as us for more or less some of the same reasons. "I grew up here," he told us, meaning the city near the resort, ...