When first I saw the vast English house that would become my home, I was overawed. An elegant redbrick Victorian vicarage in Oxford, tucked away next to a lake, with a rambling garden and an ancient willow. We toured the property as part of my husband’s interview for a job. The house came with the position, and I had come with an eye to scope the possibilities of family and creative life. What I found seemed, at first, a dream: a spacious historical home of high ceilings, sunlit walls, and fireplaces in each room, with windows shaped like those in an old gothic church and a “room with a view” for my own little study. To live in such a storied old place, I thought, what bliss.
The second time I saw it, I cringed. My husband had gotten the job, and the house was ours, but this time I looked upon it with the hard eye of pragmatism, and all I could see