She chose this block the way you choose a book before anyone else is talking about it. A public health strategist in her mid-thirties, she had been renting long enough to know exactly what she wanted: a real neighborhood, a yard she could plant in, a screened porch where mornings make actual sense. Jefferson St NE was the answer. She didn’t need the neighborhood to sell itself to her, she did her own research and liked what she found. Mornings begin on the porch with the ceiling fan running and the garden still damp, the clematis doing what it does every June. She works from home three days a week, the flex room handles it without ceremony. Evenings are for the kitchen island and whoever stopped by, for a playlist that runs unattended, for dinners that start at seven and end at ten without anyone tracking the time.