I remember walking past warm, lighted houses on dark winter nights, and feeling a powerful pull. The pull of a life, that, at that point, I expected never to have - planning for, instead, a life of hardship and scraping by in the service of “the cause”. These were modest, middle class homes, but I saw framed, in those yellow windows, a museum diorama of a particular ideal. Hardwood living rooms, lined with books, a cat, tea, a wife reading in a chair, sleeping children who, bundled in pudgy snowsuits, would hurl snowballs at each other tomorrow morning on the three block walk to the elementary school.

I figured I knew what I was supposed to be doing, and while I acknowledged those things as good, I felt that pull like a siren call to a soft, slow, comfortable death. Like a gravity that I needed to escape.

A few weeks back I joined two families I know for a birthday celebration. Three sisters, raised in Japan by missionary parents. A house full of their grown children. Hardwood floors, even. Men and women, working together in a large kitchen, making sushi. Laughing at old stories and new ones. Loud and happy.

Spending much of the last month or so with Children. Bundling them up, taking them for walks. Sled rides. Taking them swimming. Having them seek me out in crowded room, and crawl into my lap. Watching people light up with the universal warmth of a smiling baby. Seeing, with surprise, that same look of envy in the face of others, that same pull, in the presence of my apparent “family”.

Last night at Ali and Ryan’s. Loud and happy. Friends getting in each other’s way in a small kitchen, juggling and tossing vegetables and sharp objects. An amazing meal shared around a tiny table. Wine. Coffee. Not one, but two cats. Again with the hardwood. Stepping out, with the light spilling from the kitchen window, into a warmer, brighter winter night, alone but not terribly so, stumbling across the snowy, starlit alley to my door 20 steps away.

I’m not so sure about “the cause” anymore. But they might be on to something with the cat thing. And maybe the wood flooring industry…