My old house is on the market.
I first found out Thursday night from my buddy Phil. Then the messages started coming in from all over. This is no surprise given the red hot real estate market we are experiencing and the ubiquitous nature of information about houses for sale. Folks all over are keeping an eye out. Hell, one of the more popular real estate websites sent me a message Friday. Apparently, it thinks I still own it.
That’s why I don’t really trust a lot of the information on these real estate websites. There’s a lot of stuff they get wrong. Particularly real estate values.
And who actually owns a particular property evidently.
I was kind of surprised to see my old place for sale. Neither myself or the folks I sold the house to have been in our respective dwellings quite 3 years yet. Maybe they’re flippers. If they are, this is the market in which to do it, boy. God knows I’m not looking to sell. But there’s a certain number in my head that would cause me to at least take a listen. It’s not a crazy number and I bet I could get it. But I hope I don’t get that offer. The notion of moving again gives me the DTs.
I’m not widely known to be a sentimental man. But I confess to feeling kind of strange taking a tour of my old house with somebody else’s stuff in it. It’s akin to what a buddy of mine once said about going through a divorce. “You know it’s over when you see somebody else in your old front yard playing with your dog,” he said. Now I knew it was over with the old place when I signed off on the new buyer’s offer. Or made the offer on the house from which I am typing this deathless prose. Over is over. I tend not to access the memory banks very often.
Still, I could relate to my buddy’s experience. There was a kind of a cognitive dissonance “walking through” a place where I lived for years without any of my things in sight. None of my furniture. No golf clubs. No ballgame on in the background. No guitars. No whiskey bottles. It felt like I was intruding. Almost voyeuristic.
However, I was able to confirm something from the virtual tour that I had suspected while driving by from time to time. The azaleas and dogwoods are gone. Now the folks that bought my old place had the absolute right to do whatever the hell they wanted to do with the front yard. It’s none of my business. And perhaps they were transplanted to someplace in the backyard. Could very well be. None of my business in any event.
But according to a buddy of mine who is a landscaper those azalea bushes had been there for at least 50 years. And the dogwoods at least 10 years before me. I thought that I had lost them for good after the great ice storm of 2000. But the next spring the azaleas gave me again my miniature version of Augusta National. And about half of the dogwoods came back.
Those scraggly dogwoods were to me a metaphor for rebirth and courage that I always found entirely consistent with the Easter message. Further, I enjoyed immensely sitting on my porch with a beverage and simply taking in the annual festival of beauty before me.
I think we will have dogwoods in our future over here. This spring with the pandemic and the aftermath of the blizzard was just too crazy. I think we were doing good to just get through it all. And I sometimes wonder how we did.
Maybe next spring. Barring the outbreak of World War III, or the Cubs with their insufferable fans winning the World Series, this year can’t possibly be any worse than last year. And odds are we’ll still be here at what is no longer referred to as “the new place.” Seller’s market or no seller’s market.
And I hope whoever buys my old house again enjoys it as much as my friends and I did.
Perhaps by then Zillow will take me off the title.
