Decide which of the windows will be opening windows. Pick those which are easy to get to, and choose the ones which open onto flowers you want to smell, paths where you might want to talk and natural breezes. Then put in side-hung casements that open outward. Here and there, go all the way and build full French windows.—Pattern 236 from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

In 1977 Architect Christopher Alexander published an encyclopedic theory of building called A Pattern of Language, that consisted of 253 pattern rules—archetypal properties of form and function for building, and ultimately, for living. Loosely interpreted, Alexander’s premise was build it right to make the world right. The patterns begin with towns and communities, the definition of the city, neighborhoods, “house clusters.” For example, Pattern 63 is Dancing in the Street, part of a group of patterns “to provide public open land where people can relax, rub shoulders and renew themselves.” The patterns continue, from the general to the very specific, defining the attributes of workplaces, gardens, houses—walls, closets, doors, windows.

We weren’t unpacked. We hadn’t bought groceries, taken a shower, or received any mail yet. We had slept on sheets smelling of the plastic bags we packed them in. The guys who moved us from Minnesota couldn’t wait to get out of here. One of them was carrying a wicked-looking hunting knife. The knife was in a leather sheath strapped to his leg. I said that’s quite a box cutter you have there and he said he’d never been to Chicago before and didn’t know what to expect.

I’d never been to Chicago before either. Maybe I needed a knife too.

We’d come in town for three days in July and bought a house in West Rogers Park. We didn’t know the city. We didn’t know anything. My girlfriend was starting a new job. We looked at neighborhoods based on door to door driving distance. We didn’t know you had to take a bus to the el and then walk blocks and blocks to get to the door. We didn’t know anything.

When friends told us that Chicago was a city of neighborhoods, we thought of kids running through yards, backyard barbecues, street parties, borrowed extension ladders, dividing and sharing garden overflow.

We weren’t completely stupid. I asked a friend of a friend who lived in hipster Andersonville where she would buy a house. She said, “Why do you want to buy a house? Nobody lives in a house in Chicago. We live in condos and apartments with courtyard gardens. We eat out. We hire dog walkers. We pay to park.”

We talked to a realtor. He said, “A single-family home? Why do you want to buy a house?” We have dogs, we told him. We live in a house now. I want a yard. Where are we going to host all those neighborhood barbecues? Another friend told us we’d need $500k to buy a house in Chicago. $500k in Minneapolis would buy us a lakeside view, cherry wood cupboards and granite countertops, in-floor heating under an Italian marble bathroom floor.

We started looking at houses for $300k, more than we sold our house for in Minneapolis. For $300k in Chicago we were looking at shitholes. Houses with crumbling front steps, stained linoleum, plastic tile in the bathroom, holes in closet doors, pee-stained carpeting, no doors on the kitchen cupboards, piles of mildewed laundry in the basement.

The next day we were looking at houses starting at $400k. What would we compromise on? The color of the walls? The size of the yard? The number of bathrooms? The age of the roof? The condition of the furnace? At $400k we couldn’t afford to replace the roof and boiler, update appliances, build a garage. For $400k we had to be able to live in the house. Even if we didn’t like it.

At breakfast on the third day of our house search, I wept over tangy buttermilk pancakes at the Golden Nugget. I didn’t want to live in Chicago. I hated Chicago. I hated all the houses we had seen. I hated the tiny pocket yards, the narrow one-way streets, the proximity to other houses. I hated the traffic, the unavailability of parking, the trash littered streets. Our house in Minneapolis was sold. We had a closing date. We had no place to live.

We looked at a flat-faced Georgian on a corner lot in a tight and tidy neighborhood. A nice enough house meaning there was no character or distinguishing details. The home staging had reduced the house to a page from a J.C. Penney’s catalog—anybody could live here—anybody that is that liked the color blue. Every room was painted blue, a safe nondescript blue but still it was a lot of blue. The yard consisted of a cement pad and walkway to the blue garage, which had been egged. There were bits of shell and dried yolk on the blue garage door and walls. And on the painted blue fence, the blue trimmed basement windows, the blue front door. Did Chicago harbor flocks of egg hurling chickens? So much blue seemed to incite vandalism. We walked away.

We looked at one surprising modern house. The house had been owned by a dentist who saw patients in a little room on the first floor. It was a mid-century marvel: parquet floors, a wine rack, a slate patio and a koi pond. Did you know that koi will grow as many as 36 sets of teeth in a lifetime, shedding teeth as they grow and producing another and larger set? There were walls of windows and cunning built-in cubbies: maybe tooth brushes and floss had been stored there; fish food, cast off koi teeth. Although on our list of house hunting options buying a dentist’s office was right up there with buying a funeral home, I was enchanted. It was a house for a tiny fairy dentist.

We looked at an octagon-front yellow brick bungalow with beautiful landscaping. Upstairs, the wide plank floors were painted yellow and gray. I knew that folk artist bread-baking gardeners lived in that house. The cabinet pulls were wrought iron twigs and glass birds. There was a wall of ceramic leaves, doorknob sculptures. I loved the yellow face brick. I loved the purple phlox and shasta daisies in the back yard. I loved all the idiosyncratic details. I loved the sellers. I’d invite them to our first backyard barbeque. Why were they leaving this house they had made so uniquely their own? I thought they must be leaving the city, moving to Door County, where they’d vacationed for years. Now they had bought that little clapboard house in Sturgeon Bay and were selling their homecrafted cabinet pulls to tourists. There was no garage, no shower, no fence, no closets. We could live downstairs while the upstairs was remodeled. Sure we could. Not a good match for people with no skills who owned no tools such as ourselves.

We were flying back to Minneapolis in a few hours. We had no place to live. Okay, we’d rent for six months or a year and then buy a house. We’d put three or four rooms of our stuff in storage and put the dogs on leash four or five times a day and walk them outside and we’d field the complaints from other renters about the dogs’ barking and the poop we didn’t clean up and our screaming at the dogs and each other because we all hated where we were living.

We bought a house. A ubiquitous Chicago bungalow: brick with a dirty fireplace, original birch kitchen cabinets; four front casement windows fronted by oversized aluminum storms bolted in place like armor defending the passage of light and air into the house. The house felt so heavy and dark I could barely stand upright. In daylight with the original dining room fixture on, I needed a flashlight to find my way through the gloom of dark woodwork and dirty windows. It wasn’t a shithole but I hated it anyway.

At closing we received a ring of keys that baffled us. What do all these keys lock and unlock? There’s a key for the back door, another for the front, yet another for the interior front door—the back up front door; a key for the hall closet, tiny thin brass keys to the built-in cupboards; a key to the padlock on the basement door. All the keys did nothing to reassure us.

It was the morning of our second day in Chicago. It was raining. An insidious gray city rain that we expected to come leaking into the basement at any minute. Polly was unpacking the garage, leaning rakes and snow shovels against the wall, stacking clay pots, resentfully lifting the few rocks I had pulled from our Minneapolis yard. I wasn’t leaving every landscape rock behind. I either paid for those rocks–including delivery–or I lifted them and moved them all over the yard. I paid for those rocks in every way. I picked out a few distinctive granite boulders to transport to Chicago and our little tiny pocket yard. Like a memento mori of a past life; solid as regret.

I propped open the kitchen door to let in some light. What light there was was gray. The inside and the outside were the same murky gray. The ceiling fan was rotating overhead. There were no windows to open. All the windows were nailed or painted shut—or both. Who lives like that? It’s summer. None of the windows are comfortably accessible from ground level. A curious characteristic of these older bungalows is windows were built high off the ground to promote airflow. What air?

I’m in the yard with the dogs. Across the alley I can smell food cooking, hear music: top 40, Latin jazz, Indian pop. Summer is winding down. I hate Chicago. I hate where we live. Across the alley, people are sitting out on balconies, drinking, laughing. I head out the back gate with a bag of trash, Leo our wily yellow lab trotting hopefully beside me. Garbage? Gate? I heave the bag into the trash bin. The light on the utility pole shines right in an open second story window.

Keys and locks, windows nailed and painted shut. We wash the plastic smell out of our sheets, but we’re still not sleeping well.

The bedroom ceiling fan is clacking overhead. The windows behind the bed are nailed shut, a window unit in the small window above the stair landing drones loudly. The clacking and droning block any outside sound. If somebody came through the back door with an ax, we’d never hear it. Our neighbor’s dusk to dawn security lights leak through the plastic mini blinds. The room is painted beige. The carpet is beige. The sloping wall is a long low heavy slab of beige. I can’t breath. This room, this house is sucking my breath. I wake up Polly sweating and panting and we’re awake now.

We unplug the noisy air conditioner, and drag it out of the window. With a hammer and a putty knife. Polly tap tap taps at the paint seal around the sash. Tap tap tap. A little too much force and she’ll gouge the wood or break the stop. Tap tap tap. We take turns. Tap tap tap. A few hours before dawn the paint seal breaks and the window opens.

The “Windows which open wide” pattern in Alexander’s book is illustrated by a photograph from an artist’s studio. There is an easel, paints and brushes, a dog laying on a rug on a worn clay tile floor. A large twelve-light, in-swing casement window is open to the city, which is probably Paris or Rome. Inside the open window is a life of art and dogs, love and purpose. Outside is an exciting, beautiful city. There is dancing in the streets.

Photo by Flickr user Merrick Brown