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.