Last modified: Tuesday, May 13, 2008 12:18 AM EDT D'ARCONTE: How do you sell a house? Last week I told you I am a Realtor's nightmare, because in my life I haven't moved from house to house. I've lived in a lot of rented apartments and houses, to be sure, in a couple of towns in a couple of states. But I grew up in the stable environment of my grandparents' home from the time I was a little boy until I got married. I bought my first house in 1976, in Attleboro, and guess what: I still live there. Can't you just hear the Realtors groaning ... The Realtor who sold me the house is a good friend, despite the fact she knows a commission from selling me another house are kind of slim. When we moved into the house we had to borrow enough money for a downpayment - about what closing costs are today. Only time moving We thought from the beginning it would be a good place to raise kids, and it was. The school and a playground are a block away, there's a pond at the end of the street, the library and the Y and a pizzeria are a couple of blocks away, as are a couple of parks, and work is just down the road less than a mile. You can walk to the fireworks at Hayward Field and up to the corner to Main Street to watch parades. Does life get any better? We raised three kids here, survived a second-floor fire and watched the saplings in the yard grow into giant trees. In those early days you could string a rope across the street from pole to pole and get a couple dozen kids and adults to play volleyball in the street. There weren't many cars going by in those days, not until they developed some housing down by the pond. It's a high turnover neighborhood, though, with owners and renters coming and going through the years. There were rowdy years and quiet years, years the streets teemed with kids and years there were no kids at all. Living off interest While other people have moved from home to home, from town to town, from state to state, I've stayed put - often to my wife's chagrin. I'm not like other people, I guess. You put me down, I take root. It takes about 30 years anyway to get a house the way you like it, to get to know every noise, to know instinctively how many steps there are to the second floor and how many steps to the cellar, to be able to walk around in the dead of night and not bump into things. To close your eyes and remember ... where the baby grand piano once stood ... and how you and your visiting friends slept in sleeping bags on the wooden floor because the carpets and furniture were still to come ... how a sun-warmed tomato smells in your little garden ... and the din of Sunday dinner with kids, in-laws and grandkids. I sometimes wonder how you sell a house you've lived in, really lived in. Maybe I'm this way because of the way I grew up in my grandparents' old house in that old ethnic neighborhood in an old part of town. If there's something you don't like, wait long enough and it will change. Someday my grandchildren will drive by the house I'm in now and notice, like I did when I visited my grandparents' house when I was middle-aged, how small and quaint and nondescript my house is. I know if I sit on my front porch long enough, I'll see young couples pushing carriages and peppy joggers and gabbing women out for a stroll and people rushing home from the train. The gentrification of the neighborhood has begun and, hey, I don't want to miss that. See you next week.