The image above borrows from René Magritte’s 1929 painting, The Treachery of Images. He painted a pipe and wrote beneath it, “This is not a pipe.” He was right. It was a painting of a pipe. A representation. A symbol. Not the thing itself.
The same is true of the photo above. That is not a house. It’s a picture of a house. We shop for homes now the way we shop for everything else: scrolling, clicking, comparing. Zillow makes a house easy to measure. Square footage, bedroom count, price per foot. But we tend to optimize for what’s easy to measure and underestimate what isn’t.
And the hardest thing to measure about a house is everything around it. I’ve started calling that the orbit. Bend has a good one. Far from it all but close-knit, ringed by desert, rivers, hayfields, mountains and lakes. Interesting people. A strong community. And within that orbit, homes. Each with an orbit of its own.
Your orbit is yours to define. For some people it’s proximity to family. Usually it comes down to what’s nearby: the walk to school, the drive to work, the trail behind the neighborhood, the friend two blocks away, the coffee shop where they know your name, the street where your kids learned to ride a bike, the stretch of river you go to when life gets complicated.
The older I get, the more convinced I become that what surrounds a house matters as much as the house itself. Everyone is different. Some people want to be five minutes from everything. Others want to be 30 minutes from everyone. Neither is wrong.
Bend is full of people searching for the right house. What they’re really searching for is the right orbit. A place where the rhythms of daily life start to feel natural. When people ask why Bend became such a special place, I never point to the houses. I point to what’s around them. The mountains. The rivers. The parks. The schools. The neighbors. The feeling of belonging somewhere.
That’s the real value of a place. Not the structure we live inside, but the orbit we build around it.
This article appears in the Source June 18, 2026.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
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