Anne and I are buying a house. I'm scared to count my chickens, but assuming we don't hit a snag, in a few months we'll be living in this cute orange house just north of town.

We don't like that we can hear the highway, but friends tell us we'll get used to the swoosh of traffic from down the hill, that in time Friday afternoons sitting out back will come to sound like being on a cliff above the ocean. I'm hoping they're right.

Because in every other way, we're crazy about it, because it's big and warm-feeling inside and because the back yard has a small deck area and beyond it is all national forest. It's close to town and still hidden away on a road by itself, a fact that pleases me right down to my little hermit soul. But if there weren't any sound of cars it would be downright perfect.

It's only because I've been staying at my friend Matt's cabin in the mountains near the Buffalo River that I can be greedy enough to want all that and utter quiet too, but I've been spoiled by the weekends I've spent up there at his place in a rocking chair on the porch in pure bliss.

So this past Friday night at a party, my friend Julie and I were talking about the process of buying houses and selling them and how exciting and scary it was and she told me a story I wanted to share:

She and her husband were living in Dallas and they bought a house next to the railroad track--because they liked the house and thought the train wouldn't come by that often, and if it did that they would just get used to it.

But the train passed by about six times a day, at odd, unpredictable times. And it passed so near that it rumbled all through the house. They could feel it vibrate in the walls and floor.

I was thinking about what she said, imagining the train rumbling behind the house and remembering an apartment in Fayetteville Anne and I lived in, and how much I loved the train that passed by at in the morning and the evening, and then blinking my eyes realized I had lost track of what she was saying, and suddenly she was telling me that she and Brynn had decided to sell the house but couldn't. Nobody wanted to live next to the railroad tracks. Finally the house had been for sale for awhile and they were running out of money, just enough for one more mortgage payment, and after that who knows what would happen.

And then a deaf man and woman came to look at the house. They were in their early thirties. They walked around the house reading Julie's lips and they could talk well enough to say they liked the place. And while they were there inside the house a train came by and as it passed, the deaf man and his wife looked at each other, grinning. They put their hands to the walls and then leaned against the walls with their eyes half-closed.

I thought it was such a nice story, but I couldn't tell if I was supposed to feel better or worse after hearing it.