I’m not prepared for the pocket door, which slides between the walls and disappears into the body of the house, like a mother tongue withdrawing back into its language. I wish all doors in all houses knew this trick.

But the pocket door isn’t what sells me on the home. It’s the land that does it, the woods which scoop around the house to cradle it like a blanketed thing. The woods whisper a benediction to me. Finally, after two years of walking through houses that look more charming on the app, yards that seemed larger in photos, this slice of space is the one.

In this home, we’ll pause a while. No more changing states, no more changing schools, no moving from one rental to another. Here, our children will catch their breath, and we’ll all grow older. But I also know about the excitement of fresh starts and how it wanes and dulls when you’ve been in a place for a while. I know there’s a comfort in moving around from the five different rental homes of my own childhood, the last of which is where my brother died. My parents couldn’t live in that home anymore with the stain of his death, and so they purchased a new home in the same town. It was the first home they ever owned. I was in college by that time.

I picture my family’s furniture in the rooms of the home with the pocket door. The sofa that will have to sit in front of the window if we want it to face the TV. Oak cabinets stacked with the plastic toddler bowls we don’t need any more but can’t bear to toss. Bags of rice, nests of noodles, cans of beans in the pantry. My vegetable gardens stitched into the east facing slopes of the yard. The pathways we’ll cut through the forested acres—following the deer trails. I picture my children growing here: my son learning to back a car down the gravel driveway. The blackboard paint on my daughter’s wall that will one day be coated over in a color she’s picked out, a dusty blue that matches her bedspread.

It’s October when we move in, and the air is golden. The rooms wait to be filled with our words, our knowing, our ways of being. My pacing when I explain a complicated thing. The way my son says, What it is is... The light of my husband’s sci-fi TV shows slanting across the wood floors, making moods on the walls. How my daughter takes the longest baths with all the bubbles, candles everywhere.

Our first day there, we find a green tree frog in the bathroom perched on a roll of toilet paper. His resting face turns up in the corners like a permanent smile. We find raccoon paw prints pressed into the glass on the front door. And who knows what rests in the earth under all the fallen leaves. What wildflowers, what green things will unfurl their hands in the fidelity of spring. Life is a blank page. The land is a story writing itself over and over.