Aug
22
Of the various outcomes I had imagined, back when we started talking about the possibility of putting our house on the market, none of them included what is happening now, which is nothing.
I thought we’d have a bunch of people coming by, to the point of total inconvenience—oh, we have to leave the house again, quelle fucking drag—and I thought we might get low counteroffers and I thought we might find out some terrible thing during the inspection, like that the roof is actually formed of popsicle sticks and there’s a poltergeist in the TV.
Instead, there’s been virtually no activity. We’ve had exactly two agents look at the house, and one lady who was house-hunting for her adult son and liked the place enough to go and bring her son back to see it for himself, and then they went and made an offer on a bigger place with less yardwork, and all I can say about that is that if they had bought our house I would have described them as a charmingly close family who have found the perfect sort of arrangement that works just right for them, but since they didn’t, I hope Mr. Sissy Mama’s Boy is happy in the low-maintenance mansion his MOMMY bought him, since he was clearly too much of a goddamned PUSSY to live in a house where he’d have to mow a LAWN.
Ahem.
I keep thinking about all the work we did in the days before the sign went up in our yard and I feel so stupid. We reamed out closets and painted trim and cleaned windows and ripped out weeds and bought plants and hauled stuff to the dump and re-arranged rooms and it was just this totally consuming, stressful effort that went into double-time in the last few days before it officially went on the market and I swear to god we nearly killed each other in the process.
I mean, that stuff needed to be done, and I’m glad it IS done, but jesus. I went at it like we had a ticking clock hanging over our heads, you know? Like the instant we had the MLS number we’d have crowds of people banging on our door.
Every morning before I leave for work I prep the house with the hope that somebody is going to come by, which means vacuuming, picking up, wiping counters, hiding toys, making beds, and on and on it goes. The novelty has long worn off and now I go about my cleaning-lady chores feeling more and more bitter. Will anyone come by today and notice the shining floors, the neatened children’s rooms, the carefully rolled towels arranged just so in their little stupid fucking wicker basket? Oh hey, probably not, but I can’t skip it because WHAT IF THEY DO?
I planned for every contingency except nothing. In the absence of information it’s hard to know what we should consider changing. Maybe we need a new agent, a new listing price, a new set of photos, a new economy—I just don’t know yet. For now we’re just hoping something . . . happens, soon. Anything is better than nothing.
Aug
21
This morning we took the kids to a nearby town where we all sat and watched an honest-to-god parade, the first I’ve seen in years. It was charming and quaint and included familiar sights like bagpipers and kids on unicycles and that poor S.O.B who has to follow the horses with a shovel. The kids scrabbled for thrown candy and clapped their hands over their ears when the fire engines trundled by and I kept thinking, oh, I want to live where they have small-town parades.
The silly thing, of course, is that I do live where they have small-town parades. Jesus, we drove maybe fifteen minutes to get there.
I know what I mean when I think that, but sometimes it’s obvious to me that I get caught up in dreams of where we want to be—our someday-home, our someday-town, our someday-lives—and forget that there’s so much here, right now.
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