It was a home.

I sat in the car a long time before I could make myself get out, looking at that building the way a starving man looks through a restaurant window.

Everything about it announced a kind of life I had never once lived.

The potted plants meant someone was here often enough, and rooted enough, to tend growing things.

The chained bicycles meant children who went places under their own power, trusted.

The very ordinariness of it — the cracked stoop, the mismatched curtains, someone’s television drifting down through an open window — was a wealth I had somehow never acquired in all my acquiring.