On the off-chance that you've found yourself wondering what in hell is going on in what passes for my life, a summary follows. (As with many of my summaries, it starts off with the intention of being mercifully brief and somewhere along the way becomes a long-winded blather.)
15.587 months ago: your humble
The 'stuff' that needed clearing away: a house. And a big honking mountain of possessions. Far too many possessions for one little person to have. And so on arriving back to my little hilltop fiefdom in northern Vermont I got to work, beginning a long process of going through possessions and getting rid of as much as I could get myself to do. Then going through it again, getting rid of more. Blah blah blah. Also, working on the house with an eye to unloading it. And of course, as any homeowner knows, having a house means doing heaps of work to maintain it, so one can live in it without it falling apart and collapsing on one -- that meant far more trivial labors than someone trying to undertake major labors should have to slog through.
I did all that, slaving away through the warm season, and by mid-October the house was ready to go on the market. At which time the market collapsed, along with most of the rest of what gets called the economy. Strange as it may sound, the big economic downtown didn't phase me -- the house sat on 9.59 acres of spectacular land, in the middle of green mountains, with all kinds of wildlife milling about. A beautiful place that I knew would sell itself -- all it needed were potential buyers to get an eyeful.
Looking north from that green hilltop
I contracted the real estate agency I'd used when I bought the joint 9+ years earlier. The realtor who wound up handling the sale of the place was a kindly old guy -- an ex-dairy farmer, as pleasant a soul as you'd want to hang out with. Extremely pleasant to deal with but didn't, I noticed as the months passed, bring a single soul out to see the house. October gave way to November, which in turn became December. Cold weather took hold, snow arrived. Hellaciously huge amounts of snow, combining with the media's constant harping on how bad off we all were to keep potential house buyers huddled up at home watching television and eating junk food.
At one point, the owner of the real estate agency brought out three or four of his realtors to look around and psyched up. They poked around, went away. More snow fell, winter stretched on, finally easing up some in late February. And suddenly the market started waking up, buyers began poking around. March brought a few days of outrageously kind weather, snow began melting away, patches of winter-brown grass appeared. And on one of those lovely March days, a realtor brought a woman to see the house. A smart, slim woman with a beautiful, expressive face, and I had a feeling about her the moment I saw her walk around the corner of the house. Her expression made it clear that she was seeing the place the way I saw it -- gorgeous, full of magic. She and her realtor wound up staying for an hour and a half, it seemed pretty clear to me that the new owner had arrived.
And she had. An offer was made and accepted, I began giving her as much information about the place as I could come up with (having decided on a policy of full disclosure, about everything -- the opposite of what the folks who sold the place to me did -- so she wouldn't have any unpleasant surprises waiting). Snow continued melting away, March melted away before April.
I made a fast trip to Madrid (to deal with things in storage) and the English midlands (to deal with a friend's wedding). Returned for the final weeks leading up to the house sale. Found myself going from morning 'til night, faced with an overwhelming mountain of things to be done, me the only person doing them.
Stoke-on-Trent, England
One day in May I returned to the house to find a message from kindly realtor letting me know he was about to disappear due to a medical procedure, another realtor would be taking over for him. New realtor seemed bent on getting on my bad side, accomplished that mission well before the closing, cemented it during the final pre-closing days and remained obnoxious right up through the closing itself. I tried to remember that he likely wasn't actively trying to piss me off, but between his skill (inadvertent or not) at it and the increasing stress as closing day veered closer and closer, I didn't really care. By then, time had begun to accelerate with wild abandon and the mountain of things needing to be done before and on the day of the closing had me going from early morning to late at night. I began telling friends that if I ever expressed the desire to buy a house and/or land as a single person, they had express permission to smack me upside the head as many times as it would take to jolt me back to sanity.
[continued in following entry]
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This evening in the Barrio de la Concepción, Madrid:
España, te echo de menos
rws 3:15 PM [+]
Comments:
I've got all of this to look forward to in the not-too-distant future. Makes me consider abandoning the property as an option...
the good part of all this, wil, is that a lovely person bought the house, which made moving on feel easier. (getting a decent price for the place helped too.) :)
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