This house is only the beginning. There will be others, and as much as I love this house, a 100-year-old bungalow on a small farm in southeastern Nebraska, the future houses are what I see when I close my eyes. They are fantasies that consume me, dwellings so real that I can actually spend hours solving hypothetical problems--what if the house couldn't sustain additional phone lines? What if the bed can't fit through the door? What if there's a body in the attic? I imagine a plantation style house reminiscent of Isaak Dineson's farm in Africa. I imagine a Stick Style house with a wrap-around verandah, a late Queen Anne with a molded brick chimney and polygonal turrets. It's as if my little bungalow created a monster, turned me from a humble apartment dweller into a person who will not rest until she finds Villa Exactly-What-I-Want, which, after all these other styles have been exhausted, is a stately High Victorian Italianate with bay windows and a cupola that looks out over the vast prairie (of which I will own no less than 20 acres.)

The rooms of my fantasy house will be furnished sparsely yet impeccably. In the living room, nothing but a Victorian sofa, a turn-of-the-century Persian rug, and a single orchid in a vase. In the bedrooms nothing but antique iron beds with Egyptian cotton sheets. The walls are interrupted only by the occasional piece of original art. The woodwork is gleamingly preserved. The pine floors stretch into the bathrooms and the kitchen, where all the appliances date from the 1930s, though they're in perfect working condition. The cupola, with its widow's walk and towering windows on all sides, is where I will write. I will see twenty miles in every direction. I will have nothing in that room but a simple desk and a laptop computer. When no one else is home and I'm working late at night, the desk lamp and the glow from computer screen will make the cupola glow like a low, harvest moon over the prairie. Coyotes will howl at it. Bi-planes bringing visitors will use it as a beacon. I will wear a crepe-de-chine robe and velvet mules and drink gin sours from an Old Fashioned glass. Everything I write in this room will win The Pulitzer Prize

But back to my bungalow, since it's where I live now. It's one story, about 1000 square feet, has two bedrooms, a sagging porch, and old telephone cables that won't support more than two phone lines. The basement has a dirt floor and ever since the telephone man told me that mice had chewed through all the wires I've refused to go down there. (My greatest fear is that I'll be sucked up by a tornado because I'm scared of the basement.) The oven, which is circa 1967, broke down in the middle of cooking Thanksgiving turkey. Plywood has been glued over the crumbling plaster walls in the dining room and some idiot has painted over the woodwork.

Still, it's a great first step. All things considered, my house is a showplace. Before moving in, I painted the dining room Barrister White and then Cool Sausalito before settling on Riverboat Cruise, a washed out turquoise that, when covering the plywood, creates a sort of rococo effect. A long-horned cow's skull (found, not bought) is mounted above the archway in the living room. Long white, sheer cotton curtains hang from the windows. Large pieces of stained glass cover the tops of two windows. On the front porch there's a rocking chair and a porch swing, where you can sit and drink coffee and watch the cows moseying in the pasture across the road. But this activity requires caution, because sitting on the swing carries with it the remote but not implausible possibility that the porch roof will collapse.

My house is kind of like an average looking women in a spectacular designer outfit. It is upstaged by its scenery. With the miles of rolling hills to the north, the seven acres of horse pasture to the east, the five acres of natural grassland to the west, and the indescribably huge, frequently Biblical-looking sky that looms above it, the house doesn't have a prayer. In the designer outfit that is this homestead, the house is an undergarment, barely visible beneath the fine fabrics of the nature surrounding it. Which is as it should be. To live on this farm is to live in the sky and the grass as well as the house. It is to live in the barn, which has seven horse stalls and is actually bigger than the house. The barn is home to the horses, the dogs, the cat, and the barn swallows. When it's cold, the barn is where I go three times a day to break the ice that's formed in the water bowls and the stock tanks. This activity, which is only performed after putting on four layers of clothing, including a pair of Reebok acetayte warm-up pants that I bought for $55 back when I lived in New York, is exactly the kind of thing that makes you not care about the fact that you're porch is sagging because you are so glad that you have heat. And being glad for things like heat is exactly what living on a farm is all about.

Not only does this house have the distinction of being the first actual house I've occupied since I was a kid, it's the first place I've ever lived in with another person, not including the revolving door of actors and graduate students that shared my apartment in New York. I live on this farm with my significant other. And the fact that the house is the result of a joint effort, a co-mingling of tastes and chores and foods in the refrigerator, elevates it from mere house status to being a real home. He is responsible for the cow's skull and the stained glass. He is responsible for mending the fences and mowing the lawn, which requires a tractor mower. He is the one who goes outside before dawn to feed the animals, which leaves me no right to complain about the midday ice-breaking sessions.

I am responsible for the room that serves as my office, which is the low point of the entire spread. At least three quarters of the entire contents of my apartment in New York are crammed into this ten by twelve foot room. My office is where this farm stops being a farm and begins to look like a cross between a college dorm room and the foreclosure auction of a bankrupt publishing company. My office is where the ugly things are kept, the computer and the stereo and stacks of bills and old sweatshirts for which there is no room in the bedroom closet. My office is home to no less than fifteen used FedEx envelopes that comprise my "filing system" since there is no room for filing cabinets. My office is where I spent 75 percent of my time, the other twenty-five being evenly divided between outdoor chores and the preparation of meals, which are eaten at the dining room table in front of the huge picture window that looks out onto miles of prairie grass and cattle pasture. Since my chair faces away from the window I have a habit during dinner of turning my head around and looking outside, as if the view were a member of the family. I don't want to miss anything it has to say.

That's why I want my cupola. I want to be able to see in every direction, all the time, and not have to wear four layers of clothing while I'm doing it. That's why this house is just step one, the gateway drug to what is sure to be a lifelong addiction to old farmhouses in need of paint jobs and new support beams for the porch. But even though every drive in the country serves as a secret mission to find my next house--it could be around any curve, huge and dilapidated and crying out for a Victorian sofa and a single orchid, plus $30,000 of renovations--I'm not in any hurry to leave this house. I never really understood what it meant to come home until I experienced the particular joy of driving down my dark, gravel road at night and seeing the glow of my little house in the distance. No matter where I move, this will always be my first house. When I'm old and sitting in that cupola, I'll close my eyes and see the sagging porch, the turquoise painted plywood, the barn swallows dipping in and out of the rafters. No fantasy, no matter how splendidly realized, can take the place of your first love. No Italianate mansion will be like this place, the first place, the house that made me fall in love with houses.