There is a sliver of land at the end of my street shaped like a piece of pie. Where its crust would be is a curving concrete wall that acts as a low barrier against the tangle of freeways where I-10 meets I-45 just outside of downtown. The rest of the pie is bounded by chain link fences; on one side it abuts a vacant lot, while the other simply faces the dead-end street that once ran all the way from here in the First Ward to the Northside neighborhood that was severed by those thick strips of freeways long ago.

I don't know if anyone owns the piece of pie. It doesn't seem like it, at least from the state of things—overgrown weeds and gnarls of kudzu sprawl from tree to tree on the small patch of land. I can't imagine anyone wanting it, sitting here on a stump of a street, the steady wind tunnel roar of interstate traffic rushing past so close you could stick an arm out from the patch of land and have it lost forever to a passing semi.

But I want it. I walk past it with my dog at least once a day, imagining the tiny home my fiancé and I could build there—just large enough to have a couple of bedrooms and a one-car garage, maybe a study, leaving plenty of room for a wood deck shaded by the few oak trees on the land and the looming shadows of overpasses above. I wonder if the soil would be decent enough to plant vegetables in; if it's not, I'll just get some of those above-ground planters and spend the summers trying in vain to give away all the peppers and basil that just won't stop growing.

I am the product of my city, born in Sharpstown, raised in Kingwood, then Memorial. I've lived in Montrose and Midtown, the Energy Corridor and the Warehouse District. I spent my first paycheck on a pair of boots and wore them, years later, to my first job out of college at the Houston Livestock Show & Rodeo. My parents raised me on boudin at Ragin Cajun and baba ghanoush at Fadi's, taught me how to speak Spanglish and how to drive on the Katy Freeway, took me to free Houston Symphony concerts at the Miller Outdoor Theater and the Westheimer Street Festival when it was still weird.

I was 23 the first time I saw snow, on a business trip in Rochester, NY; I found it threatening rather than magical after learning I'd have to drive in it. When I travel to Phoenix and Tucson to visit family, the dry desert air makes my nose bleed and my hair deflate; Houston's humidity "keeps our skin young," my mother is fond of saying, "and our hair big."

On a recent vacation to Costa Rica, the foreign sound of the surf kept catching me by surprise every time I heard it. The occasional trip south to Galveston doesn't prepare one for the clamor and crash of the Pacific Ocean. "Sounds like a thunderstorm is moving in," I kept telling my fiancé, far more accustomed to the noise of a coming summer shower than waves smashing on a shore.

I never got used to hearing the sound of the ocean from our beachfront hacienda in Costa Rica. I suppose with time I would have, and it would one day be as relaxing and familiar to me as my mother humming Edelweiss when she used to put me to bed as a child. The furious, fuzzy noise would be soothing at best, white noise in the background at worst.

But I don't want the sound of the ocean in my backyard; I want the sound of Houston in my backyard. I want conjunto music and honking horns and barking dogs and laughing children; I want the jangling of the paletero on his bike and the hiss-puff of Metro buses and, yes, even the occasional scream of a siren. I want that tiny sliver of land, perhaps the only scrap I could afford in my beloved First Ward at this point in the neighborhood's life cycle. Thickets of towering townhomes accrete by the day, our little bungalows and communities erased forever, buried under concrete and progress, no different than fates of the homes that used to line this stump of a street and are now gone save for a few concrete steps on cleared lots.

Houston doesn't have a seashore. But it's home, and to me the flood of freeway traffic is as calming and reassuring as the cascading drumbeat of waves on foreign shores. I want to live on that little piece of land that's been forgotten and left behind as the city morphs and changes. I want to carve out a homestead in the core of the place that raised me, molded me. I want to nestle as closely to its heart as I can, to feel it beating next to mine. I want to raise a new generation of Houstonians who love this place even more fiercely than I can imagine, who were baptized in its bayous and for whom the thunderous rumble of the city is as evocative as any ocean.