Page 3 of The Treasure House

Florence hadn’t been planned. I’d been a naïve (dumb) twenty-one-year-old who was primed to fall in love the moment someone showed her a speck of affection. I was a mess of attachment and abandonment issues when I met Tim, and I fell hard and fast. I found myself knocked up in my junior year of college, to a guy I thought I loved, who was just as naïve (dumb) as I was.

He wanted me to keep the baby, and I was young enough to believe him when he said he’d always be there. I wanted to believe him so bad, and, as we assembled a flat-pack cot in the studio apartment we’d found, I really thought we might make it. Tim now lives with his fiancée, Alyssa, in Seattle, where he moved after graduate school. He calls Flo on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and sends her packages by courier. He pays child support. Mostly. It doesn’t seem to bother him too much, living on the other side of the country from her. I, meanwhile, can hardly stand being away from her for a weekend when she goes to visit Tim. I would hike barefoot across the Rocky Mountains in the depths of winter to get to her. I would fight bears for that kid.

Or give up my education and work eight hours a day doing credit checks for a medical center.

I opened a listing for a pretty shiplap cottage, with a treehouse in a spreading oak out back, and a child’s bedroom painted to resemble a fairy bower. I pretended we lived there and that I put Flo to bed each night in that candy-pink bunk bed, even though she was way too old for pink now. Or so she kept telling me. The unsettled feeling in my belly started to recede.

“How about this?” I turned the phone around to show them what I’d found.

Eva, who had kids of her own, sighed approvingly. “You think I could squeeze a third bed in there?”

Caitlin, who didn’t have kids, wrinkled her nose. “That’s not a fantasy house. It’s too real.”

I shook my head. “It’s perfect.”

No one tells you how hard parenting will be—the closest that seasoned parents ever get to spilling the secret to the uninitiated is a kind of wry look. Because how can you tell the untested that mother-love is a big blood-dark tumor of a feeling? It’s nothing like a soft-focus Johnson & Johnson ad for baby powder. It’s more like Titanic. You know the ship is going down, no matter what you do, but by God you’re going to get that kid on a floating door (or in a candy-pink bunk bed) before you die.

Loving Florence scares me.

Until Florence, I never realized how sad I was, how alone. I didn’t see how emotionally neglected I’d been. But when I looked at her, my life snapped into focus, and it was the opposite of pretty. The thought of her living my childhood, alone in a cold apartment, reheating packet mac and cheese to the soundtrack of reruns, and constantly jumping to check the door was locked when the neighbors argued too loud? It just about broke me.

But how much better was I doing than Tina? Sure, I wasn’t getting high or leaving Flo alone while I worked the streets, and I wasn’t doing jail time, but we lived in a shabby rental with dodgy heating. A rental I wouldn’t even be able to afford much longer.

“I will get a ticket for the Mega Millions,” I blurted, as I stared down at the fairy bedroom that I couldn’t afford.

And that was when Caitlin said something that changed my life forever.

“Forget the Mega Millions,” she said as she rose to tip her uneaten leftovers into the trash. “You just need one of those treasure houses.”

I had no idea what she was talking about. “Treasure houses?”

“You know, the ones on TikTok. The hoarder houses.” Caitlin lit up as she pulled out her own phone. “Oh my God, you’re going to love this. Here.” And then she handed me my future.

Two

Treasure houses, it turned out, were houses no one wanted. Filled to the brim with the detritus of messy lives, they were junk heaps. But you could see that once they’d been loved—you could tell by the remnants of patterned wallpaper that someone had obviously chosen with care; the old, rusted swing sets in overgrown gardens; dusty photos in tarnished frames.

I felt an immediate affinity with the treasure houses on TikTok.

The first reel I watched was of a teensy little house in Traverse City, Michigan. It was the size of a small mobile home and was surrounded by junk. There were old sinks, rusted-out wheelbarrows, ten-gallon drums tipped on their sides, and a general scattering of discarded objects. The couple who’d bought the house were a smiling, peppy pair in work boots, wielding hammers. The reels showed them clearing out their little house at double speed, their smiles never faltering. As I watched, the neglected house emerged from its gloom, turning into a cheerful buttercup-yellow cottage with sunny white interiors and views out of the front windows to freshly mulched garden beds.

And the kicker?

They paid $37,000 for the junk-filled place. And sold the buttercup-yellow dream for more than $200,000.

I mean, seriously…

$37,000 for a house.

The treasure houses were in far-flung parts of the country, in places that didn’t specialize in McMansions and yacht moorings: Fort Flagg, Alabama; Quilty, Georgia; Nailsworth, Ohio. There were treasure houses in Minnesota, South Dakota, Indiana, and New Mexico, all in towns I’d never even heard of. The treasure house hashtag led me to people who were wrestling with mold, mildew, opossums and raccoons, salt damp, poison ivy and poison oak, asbestos and emotional overwhelm. But… every last one of them had a house. A home. On the kind of budget that seemed preposterous.

My kind of budget.

If those houses had been in more desirable places, they’d be sold for serious money, even as wrecks. But they were in nooks of the country where few wanted to live, and even fewer were prepared to take on the labor of clearing them out. I followed one woman who went by the tag HandyMom24—she was a single mother with three kids who had bought a treasure house in Washington state for $62,000. It was a farmhouse out of a picture book, only threadbare, with split window frames, a sagging chimney, and paint so faded and flaked it was hard to tell what color it had once been. The yard was a wasteland, with an ancient hemlock rising behind the house. My heart pinched at the sight of that farmhouse, crouching sadly under the hemlock like a homeless old dog.

But as the reels cycled, I saw HandyMom24 and her three kids unload dark new earth from a truck to cover the dusty yard. They splashed fresh whitewash on the house’s exterior, turned the front door cherry red. While the house slowly transformed, a jack-o’-lantern appeared on the crooked top step in fall, Christmas lights twinkled in the hemlock in winter, and by summer little bursts of flowers had sprung up at its feet. The farmhouse was still old, but it was loved. Lived in.

I’m not ashamed to say that I watched those reels at least a dozen times after work and another dozen times later in bed, my headphones on so the sound of HandyMom24’s narration wouldn’t wake Flo. Our apartment was so small that you could hear everything the other person did from wherever you were in the apartment; from the kitchenette I could hear Flo’s toothbrush, from the bedroom I could hear the hum of the refrigerator, from the shower I could hear the bedsprings as Flo sat down to put on her shoes in the morning. And our twin beds practically touched. That had done wonders for my love life, as you can imagine.