Home: A Desire for Permanence

Before Seattle resident Edith Macefield died at age eighty-six in 2008, she refused to sell her house to developers for the $1 million they had purportedly offered. Macefield wanted to die at home. Seven years later, long after Macefield’s death, the small six-hundred-square-foot bungalow continued to crouch low in the middle of high-rise commercial buildings in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood.

The house stood as a symbol of an earlier generation’s simplicity, stability, and rootedness. It even became something of a shrine to welcome pilgrims like Elizabeth Forte, who had brought her…