Seventeen years ago my roommate at the time told me she was getting married and I needed to find a new home. The year was 2000, in San Francisco, and the dot com bubble had not yet burst. I showed up to open houses to find dozens of applicants ahead of me, cash deposit in hand, bidding on places of questionable character. I knew I would have to pay more to move from a shared place with a roommate to a place on my own, but I wasn’t prepared for the rents that were twice, and sometimes three times as much, as I had been paying, for places that were twice, and sometimes three times less nice, than where I had been living. After weeks of looking, the move-out date was approaching and I still didn’t have a place to live. I saw an ad for a studio on Craigslist, asked if I could see it that afternoon, left work early to beat the rush of applicants, and met the agent on the sidewalk. We walked up three flights of stairs, she opened the door, I walked into the hallway and said, “I’ll take it.” She looked perplexed. “Don’t you want to see the rest of the apartment?” “Nope, this is great.” It was clean, it was in a quiet neighborhood, and it was more or less (much more) in my budget.

I had a housewarming party a week later. Friends crowded in to the tiny studio; we toasted to new beginnings. And I received what would become one of my favorite gifts of all times. A simple vase with blue glass edging, with a note to invest in a $5 fresh bouquet of flowers each week. Since then, I’ve picked a small bouquet each week and arranged it in this vase that has followed me from that studio to multiple other homes. And it continues to bring me as much joy now as it did that first week in my new studio, seventeen years ago.