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This morning I made a verbal commitment to buy a house.

Not just any house. This is my grandmother's old house, a beautiful big double-block house dating from the early years of the 20th century, with three bedrooms and one bath on each side, wrought-iron fence in the front, a glider swing on the front porch, and grapevines in the back. A house in which I spent many of the happiest days of my youth.

My grandmother didn't live there anymore after her stroke back in 1992, and even before her death in 1998 ownership had passed to my uncle, who died last May. In the fall of 1997, when she knew I was looking to buy a house, she had implored me to buy hers. "It's a double-block, so you can move your mommy and daddy next door so you can watch over them," she said, trying to pitch the house to me. These days my father no longer needs watching, and my mother will be less than a mile across town. The current tenants (on the left side of the house) will be moving out in a few months, and I haven't decided what I will do with that side of the house. I don't want to rent it out, but I don't know if I want to violate the integrity of the poured-plaster walls by smashing though them and turning this into a single enormous house.

I still have a few months to work out the financing - the asking price is quite low, but not so low that I will be able to fulfill my dream of buying a house with a briefcase of cash. But by the end of this Spring, if all goes as planned, I will be a homeowner.