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We began our return to America four years ago today--that's Felix on the luggage carrier there, not Gideon--flying in from Amsterdam to find an apartment, preparatory to the final move a month later. A successful trip, we found and rented our current place, a two-bedroom, one-bath, across-the-street-from-the-playground-and-with-two-garages-worth-of-storage-space steal that suited us very well at that time.

That was then, this is now. We're a bigger family in every sense, the playground is no longer the center of our universe, and we're tired of renting and of living with the sense of innumerable life projects on hold until we find our real home. It's time, long since time, to buy a house and say farewell to this one.

Easier said than done. We've been hunting for a house for many months and getting the lay of the land for some years. Fairfax is the place for us, that much we know, and it's a precious piece of knowledge, but Fairfax is a very challenging market, combining as it does high prices, low quality, and limited stock, something like what you might find at a gas station minimart in the middle of the Mojave. In a word, a bad place to shop.

So we've been hunting, yes, but we have not been finding. Nothing to bid on, nothing we could even imagine ourselves in, and meanwhile a new real estate bubble has started rapidly inflating, driven by the Bay Area's continuing economic success and the beginning of the end of low interest rates. A frustrating search accompanied by a looming sense that the window of opportunity, for us in this place, is rapidly closing.

And then comes word from our real estate agent, friend and father of friend: he thinks he has an opportunity to buy something off market, might we be interested? Yes, we might very well be, what's the story? It seems our realtor's wife's sister has lived for a long time with a man but that relationship has ended, she has moved out, and he, busy with other matters, no longer needs or wants his property here in Fairfax. If we can agree on a price, and move quickly, we might be able to buy from him and shortcut around the nasty frantic bidding war part of things.

But it gets better, much, much better. The realtor's wife's sister threw a birthday party in this house for the realtor's little daughter, Lucy, friend of Felix, a couple of years ago. Felix was invited of course, and he and I attended. The theme was Knights and Princesses (a joke I only now, two years later, get: the house is on Court Lane) and Felix chose Knight.You see him, below, striding into the party, tube sword in one hand, holy Bible in the other, just as it was getting started:

And, more pertinently, you see the house there on the left, the covered patio in center, and at the back, the barn.

That's right, a barn, a real barn, with barn doors, and a hayloft. I love barns. I loved the house, too, and all the space around it, and when someone pointed out to me that the entire party was taking place on only half the property, the rest being a kind of paddock down below next to a lovely creek, I realized that this was really a very special piece of Fairfax and exactly the sort of piece that we were dreaming of owning one day.

That day is today, for it is this selfsame house our realtor was proposing, and with a lot of help from him, from a no-nonsense mortgage broker, and not least from our generous family, we threw ourselves into the negotiations, the contracting, the endless DocuSigning TM, and came out the other side holding, as of this morning, the deed.

I could tell you more about the house, post some pictures, but we don't yet really know the place, and the photos we have are all of someone else's house with someone else's stuff in it. (Hint: Use the "Breakfast by Email" box to make sure you don't miss a future posting containing those pics.) And besides, at the moment I'm thinking, and so writing, less about the house and more about the process, the lucky, lucky process that got us it, and about the person who is, and from the outset always has been, the one who has brought us every good thing there is to be had in Fairfax. I mean Felix of course, lord of this land. It was Felix's friend Lucy's dad who found us the place and brought us the deal. It was his friend Noah's dad who introduced us to the mortgage broker. And it was his friend Logan's dad who crawled under, over, and around it and gave us the professional reassurance we needed that the structure was basically sound. And they all did this, I think, first and foremost because at this point Fairfax just wouldn't be Fairfax anymore without him. So thank you Felix, you creator of community and very fine fellow:

And Felix, welcome home.