After looking at several houses along Alabama’s Gulf Coast, we decided the sunny cottage on Audubon Drive in Foley was the one—so long as the seller came down a little on the price.

It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, an attached garage, a tidy shed that was painted picnic-table red and a pair of towering longleaf pines. It sat in an oval subdivision of cookie-cutter homes on a lot roughly the size of a basketball court. There was just enough room for the dog to run in the backyard without trampling the vegetable garden we envisioned.

It was convenient to my newspaper office in Foley and to the school in Gulf Shores where my wife taught kindergarten. The beaches along the Gulf of Mexico were a short drive away, but far enough to pardon us from flood insurance. The Realtor walked us over to see the neighborhood playground.

A week before Thanksgiving in 2005, we signed the papers to buy the house for $137,500. We painted the walls and hung blinds in time to have friends over for the holiday.

Twelve years later, little about my life remained the same. I’d left Alabama to take a job at The Wall Street Journal. I was no longer married. Pierre, the dog, had died of old age. But I was still sending mortgage payments each month to a bank in Alabama.