Signing on the dotted line

The realtors came by Friday --Amber and Charessa --kind of a tag team effort.

I was still dragging stuff and shoving it out of sight when they pulled up: a piece of outdoor carpet from the porch, a length of water hose that had sat out on the patio since that last time I'd watered the pumpkin patch in October.

A minor selling point. Pumpkins grow like crazy here. Whoever buys this place, if they plant pumpkins and wait out in that pumpkin patch, I feel they have a pretty good chance of meeting The Great Pumpkin, who brings presents to all the good boys and girls.

I tried last year, but I'm sort of an asshole. He passes us by. Sally is still pissed.

Anyway, I probably should have put that up sooner.

"It looks nice," Charessa said. "You've got some flowers and some nice color."

Amber smiled brightly.

I nodded, tried to say something about the roses without mentioning the thorn I'd driven through my knuckle while trimming them back a few days before. I'd had to cut it out of my hand with a Gerber multi-tool that I'd bought myself because I like to believe I have the capacity for self-reliance and a 40 dollar pair of pliers you're supposed to carry everywhere with you is a symbol of that self-reliance.

Of course, I don't carry them everywhere. They look preposterous hanging on my belt, like a bat utility belt starter kit. Carrying them in my pocket is cumbersome and uncomfortable. They tend to drag shorts down and I can't imagine why I'd want them with a pair of swimming trunks.

So, my self-reliance is stored in a drawer, along with the clippers I use to trim my little dog's nails.

Charessa ambled around the property looking for good angles of the house to shoot with her camera. Amber walked me through the contract.

Amber was who sold me the house in the first place. I went with who I knew. She'd seemed honest back when my ed and I had looked at houses to buy, had told us which ones wouldn't qualify for the kind of loan we could get. She'd been positive and friendly and I've been stressed about selling the place for weeks.

It was pretty painless. We went through a little paperwork. I checked little boxes, which was wrong, and then went back and initialed my name next to different statements and declarations concerning my knowledge of the house. I knew about as much as I knew when I got the place --except of course, I'd thought the property was smaller when I bought it.

My next door neighbor explained that much to me about two months into the mowing season during my first Spring.

"Do you know where the property line is?" She asked and I'd pointed to one place.

She'd shaken her head and pointed quite a ways down further and up.

I recall my actual words.

"Oh, shit."

I only have a push mower. 

The upside was that the blueberry bushes were mine --and the birds'.

Amber got me through the paper work, explained that the contract was for six months, told me about how some people try to cheat the realtor out of their commission toward the end of the contract by getting buyers to wait a few weeks after the contract ended.

There was some sort of a clause in the contract that prevented that, not that I was interested in cheating her out of her rate. My goal is only to get out of the house, pay whatever fees and taxes associated with that and move on to some other place that suits me better, costs me less money and time, and doesn't have any personal baggage.

I agreed to list it at $109,000, which basically does just that.

Anyway, we all hoped I'd be out before six months.

Taking Ownership

I used to think that my father told me, "The things you own, end up owning you."

He didn't, actually. It's a line from "Fight Club," but my dad says things like that and it's been a thought in my head for ages.

Over the last couple of days, I've been doing a lot of cleaning and grooming --my realtors who may be reading could very well be shaking their head. I'm not the neatest guy anybody has met. I don't think of how I live as dirty, but I do gravitate toward cluttered.

I have a lot of books. Most of them will never get read because I am a devoted patron of my public library and usually lug about 25 pounds of books home every other week or so.

There have never been more than four coffee drinkers in this house at any one time. Yet, I have over a dozen coffee mugs. I also have a wide variety of kitchen gadgets. The good ones, like my Kitchenaid mixer, I use at least once a month. The crappy ones, like an Oster food chopper, I haven't used since George Bush was president --and like W., the only thing it regularly accomplished was making an impossible mess.

I keep clothes I can't wear any more and probably wouldn't wear if I could and somehow, some way. I have CDs from college, back when my musical leanings were even more suspect than they are now.

I have tax documents that go back 15 years and, inexplicably, fast food receipts from four years ago. How or why I kept them, I don't know.

The yard wasn't so great either. The previous owner installed several really cute garden beds and put in a couple of posts to hang flags --he also put a big wooden cross six feet from the front door. You could probably display a banner to let the King know the knights of the round table were welcome to stop by --maybe-- but it looked like a big cross to me; not quite big enough to crucify a full-grown man, but certainly a dwarf or elf.

I'd never liked the thing, but in three years I'd also done nothing about it.

I'd also done next to nothing to maintain the flower beds. Oh sure, I talked a nice game when it came to my vegetable garden out back, but I'd let the tiger lilies and the rag weed battle it out on their own in the front. If the rose bush wanted to make a play for the driveway --I could care less.

But now that I wanted to sell the place, it was brought to my attention that I needed to care. I needed to care that I was quietly becoming a hoarder and that my yard was becoming a jungle fun land and future nesting ground for snakes and prehistoric reptiles.

"Babe," my girlfriend said. "You have to show people the possibility. It doesn't have to be perfect..."

But it needed to be better than it was. I had to give them a reason to want to live here.

In the first week, I removed six leaf bags of yard waste. The week after that, I did six more. The week after that, I felt guilty about the amount of extra trash I was leaving for the waste management company and tossed four bags, plus a couple of boxes full of stuff from the house into a dumpster --plus I left two bags for the truck.

This week, I left out eight bags.

They took two.

Bastards.

Over the last couple of days, I've washed floors, scrubbed counters and thrown away all kinds of things I didn't even really remember I had. I've stumbled across papers and memories, some of them unpleasant --there's nothing like re-reading a letter written nervously from jail or finding that last birthday card your grandma sent you when her handwriting looked so weak or half a dozen other things that we keep that we never mean to, but don't discard because it means having to look at them one more time.

Some of them had owned me, but they were all just the ghosts of ghosts; not even proper haunts, but what was left over when the spirit had moved on --practically nothing.

I threw it all out and then told the realtor I was ready to put the house on the market.

How I got here

In order to go forward, I have to repeat a story I've retold to the point where it feels like a worn-out joke.

I never wanted the house. Seriously.

I tell people this and nobody believes me.

"But you've got all that space," the say. "And it's out of town. And you own it..."

Mostly, these are people I know who rent, who like me have rented for years and years. Buying a home is one of the great jewels in American accomplishment,

But I never wanted that --at least, I didn't really want this house.

I bought the house in 2011. It was a long and grueling process. My wife at the time had been very keen on us having a place. There were reasons for that. She wanted roots. She wanted space to do art. She wanted some place kind of away from so many people. She wanted security and ownership and being part of a permanent community.

I didn't disagree with any of that. To rent is to lose money. I'm not stupid, but she was thinking farther out in the country. I was thinking conveniently located on the bus line with easy access to stuff like groceries, booze and food delivered by people who have already calculated the tip.

We looked at a couple of places. The one she wanted was way, way out in the sticks, where the nearest neighbors were cows and horses. It was 16 acres up a narrow, winding road and located across from a little, white church that gave me the creeps.

She loved the place, but the bank wouldn't finance it. The land was fine, but the house had a laundry list of things that needed to be fixed --I think in the bank's view, it would have been better just to scrape the building from the earth and erect a tent.

She was heartbroken --me, not so much.

The next couple of places we looked at were either just as bad or didn't fit what we thought we wanted and needed. One of them, near the highway, smelled like a funeral home and felt spooky, but mostly, they just didn't fit.

The last two places were similar -three bedrooms, a couple of bathrooms with big yards and lots of storage. The place I preferred was in Cross Lanes, on one side of the county, but very near shopping and traffic. There was a bar a quarter mile down the road. The local casino wasn't far either.

The bus line, which has been helpful in the past, was just a few blocks away.

The one she thought she could live with was on the other side of the county in a place called Pinch, an unincorporated town with not much more than a gas station, a pizza place and a hardware store.

I went along with it because the house hunt had been incredibly stressful. I just wanted it finished. I was tired of looking, tired of talking about it and tired of the relentless tension --and it didn't seem like such a bad place. We talked over what we'd do if we got it, how we'd divide the space up between the two of us.

I wanted a place to write. She wanted a place to do art, write, sew, whatever. She wanted the little wood shop for that, while I thought the tiny little pantry in the back of the house with plain walls and no windows would be a good place to finish my book.  

I was going to grow a garden. There were (are) fruit trees. The yard seemed big enough for kids to play in. It had a nice sized kitchen and a fire place.

It was the middle-class American dream.

After more hurdles and hassles with getting financed (that's another post), we got the place at the sweltering end of June. We weren't even unpacked when the marriage came to an abrupt, but quiet, anticlimactic end.

About a month later, she moved out --moved out to the place with 16 acres, out in the sticks that made me so uneasy. The owner contacted her out of the blue about renting it to her with the vague idea of maybe selling the property to her later.

That was a strange bit of serendipity, an omen, maybe. She got the place she wanted and I got the house neither of us wanted in Pinch. 

In the spring, I planted a garden. I bought some furniture, made apple butter from my own homegrown apples, made as much noise as I wanted, and have been totally unconcerned about what the neighbors think of me --clearly: I don't have a working dryer and my underwear gets hung up in the backyard (For those of you into that kind of thing, I'll post a schedule).

I've mowed the lawn a million times and enjoyed a certain amount of serenity, reading books near the front window overlooking my front yard, but there's been very little contentment. I do not sleep easily and the place wears me out, if only because the fit has been so uneasy. 

I have written almost nothing worthwhile since I've been there. My other blog mostly dried up and my novels have turned into wastelands where I simply re-write the same eight pages over and over different ways.

Living there has become a kind of paralysis creatively; in my personal life; professionally --just about in every way I can think of.

It's not just the time and the oh-so-precious writer crap, but there's the money. While I got a pretty good deal on my mortgage (thanks to the housing bubble collapse and the attempts to resuscitate the market), it's still a bit more than I can pay. There isn't much left over, less now that I have health insurance again, less now with the cost of everything else steadily going up except my wages, which have barely changed in almost a decade. 


I've been thinking about putting the house up for sale almost from the time it became mine officially, when the deed was officially signed over. It's just taken me this long to do anything about it.