The first night my wife and I spent in our first home in Brighton was the first night we lived together, having been married earlier that day.

I do not note this from a position of principle. Pre-move house prep had me scraping up fossilized clumps of cat crap, a parting gift from the previous owner’s six indoor pets. Such tasks put nobody in a place to judge.

Anecdotal evidence, however, hints that in terms of pre-marriage living, we are exceptions in our age bracket. I’m 40. Elizabeth remains a perpetual 23. This does not make us better nor worse than pre-vow roommates, but I believe it left us with a bigger first-home impression than for those who share space before saying I do.

We weren’t just learning how to execute a closing or install a hardwood floor. After being together for four years, we were starting to experience life as husband and wife.

Both of us learned, for example, that I enjoyed cooking. It was a skill unlocked and expressed because I had someone to cook for instead of eating sandwiches bachelor-style over the sink. A related discovery was that my new wife, a ballet dancer at the time, obliterated the calories I prepared while they concurrently stuck to my waistline.

It’s why we still feel a keen pull to those snug 617 square feet where we lived for nine years. I recall a strong sense of discovery to the home’s character — how our generous windows sucked in sunlight that made our yellow walls even brighter, how our two bedroom closets accommodated a pleasant amount of clothes, or how we organized foodstuffs in our pantry quite well.

Of course, those same windows might as well have been open in the winter for how efficiently they sealed out the cold. The closet floors would be littered with evidence of the mice that made them their playgrounds. The pantry door would come off its track no matter how many ham-handed tweaks I tried to apply.

Those warts did not blemish our home’s location. The No. 86 bus stopped 50 feet from our front door for Elizabeth’s commute to Harvard Square. When I needed to get to and from TD Garden, I had four options: the bus to Harvard Square and the Red Line to the Charles stop, the No. 57 bus to Kenmore and the Green Line to North Station, a sprint down Storrow Drive, or even a bike ride on the Esplanade. The car wash where we exchanged dollar bills for laundry quarters was across the street.

But the reason behind the potency of memories from our Brighton condo was what we started in it. I remember Elizabeth standing and smiling in the bathroom upon confirmation of our first child’s pending arrival. She had a similar, albeit more tired, smile when I woke to find her in our rocking chair in the first stages of labor. Two years later, when Wright followed Hana, they shared a bedroom I once used as my office. Now, as they fight like mad, I marvel at how they slept in the same room without initiating neighbors’ 911 calls.

Elizabeth and I have been married for 15 years, six of which we’ve spent in our second home. We know each other well. She understands how I like to keep our bedroom windows open as far into fall as possible. I acknowledge the care she applies to the seedlings that populate a living room table during the winter.

These are not things young couples learn on dinner dates while living apart. We figure them out when we move in together. We started that journey in our first home.

Fluto Shinzawa covers the Bruins and NHL for the Globe. He can be reached at fshinzawa@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeFluto. Send a 550-word essay on your first home to Address@globe.com. Please note: We do not respond to submissions we won’t pursue.