Bruce’s house is going on the market. It is behind us, up the slope. Bruce doesn’t live there: he moved down country a few years ago and it’s been tenanted since. When we moved in we couldn’t see it, until we found the privet trees between us were on our side and I poisoned them, and their leaves blew off in green drifts until Bruce’s house slowly emerged.

‍

There’s a new garden between the houses on both sides, planted by us once we’d cut down the privets, but it’ll be another year or two before Bruce’s house disappears again behind the trees – tītoki, karaka, pūriri, ribbonwood, possibly it was overkill. In the meantime, our renovation project continues to be a theory rather than a reality, and the laundry is outside.

‍

I’ve long thought we should buy Bruce’s house. I think we should do this because – and I am sorry about this Bruce – it is a little 1960s house in a suburb with heritage controls to anything built before 1940 and therefore is the only house in the street that can be replaced with something new. I’ve come to love villas, but I’ve always had a hankering to build a new house. So I’ve wondered if the house behind us might represent a good opportunity in a suburb that is otherwise tightly controlled.

‍

I said this at the pub last night. It was Easter Thursday and Hannah rolled her eyes and our daughter Marti looked alarmed, eyes wide. We’re selling the house? And Hannah and I both said: no, we’re not selling the house. And I felt bad for inspiring fear in my soon-to-be nine-year-old because we’re never going to sell this house, or at least not for a really long time – and we’re not buying Bruce’s.

‍

It’s already six years since we bought it, which means we’ve lived here almost as long as we lived in our first house. Together, these two houses represent some of the longest time I’ve spent anywhere.

‍

We never thought we’d be in our old house that long; we always intended to be here for longer. Time stretches, eh?

‍

Similarly, the houses in this issue are long-term family homes – or on long-time family land – to which their owners are deeply attached... And from which our guest creative Elisapeta Heta has imagined letters to future occupants, which I thought was a lovely idea when she pitched it.

‍

Because that idea of time changes things. It changes your perspective on what’s worthwhile, and what’s expedient. The horizon line moves. It also affects your tolerance of how long it is acceptable to live without storage or with a dysfunctional kitchen, or with a view of Bruce’s house up the hill. Because if you’re going to be here decades, what’s five years between friends?

‍