Features: The Ultimate Philadelphia Dream House: I Love It, It’s Perfect, Now Change It

Next, I developed a topiary problem: I was buying them on a near-daily basis, which John clearly noticed but never commented on, because he is sweet. As obsessed as I was with buying topiaries, so John was with TVs. I went with him to Tweeter and Circuit City in an earnest pledge of support, but after two hours eventually ended up sitting outside reading magazines. He really cared about these TVs: He had reams of materials, folders several inches thick with research, had bought the magazines and scoured the Internet. He had measured and planned and debated the merits of digital recording. It was all lost on me, but I was excited for him. The night that his plasma TV was installed, we couldn’t get the cable to work, and the screen went blue. Also, the power went out in our bedroom, and it was pitch dark and a little hot in there. I was used to the quirks of old houses; to John, this was all new and unwelcome. Then, we went out for a burger and had a fight. When we got home, John paced the halls miserably, returning occasionally to check the plasma TV, which hung there, mocking him with its cold blue-screen stare. He never said anything about the fact that he would have been perfectly happy in a newer house that didn’t have power outages, but how could he not be thinking it?

As I fretted quietly to friends and my sister over whether John would want to run away to pretty much any house built after 1955, Restoration Hardware lost one of the brown love seats. It seemed like a big thing to lose to us, but it turns out their warehouse is very large. The day they found it, as the delivery dudes brought in the love seats, I was standing there worrying obsessively about when John’s TVs would start working, and about the 16-year-old cat adjusting to another new house. The cat had seemed fine, if a little subdued, until he spied the brown velvet. His huge gold cat eyes took on a look of slightly unbalanced love; he jumped into the cushions of the one on the right, and took a six-hour nap. Dylan the six-year-old began to wail on guitar right next to Spike the cat, but nothing could part Spike from the sofa. Things began to seem more normal, all of a sudden. Tyler caught 11 frogs one afternoon at a pond down the street. John and I had friends over for bagels one Sunday, and John told them that he loved the house. I dialed back on topiaries. The cat got up occasionally, ate, looked happy, and jumped back into the sofa, where he now lives around the clock.