Re-reading my “On this Day...” journal entries this past week, I was reminded of how much better off I am than 14 years ago: on August 26, 2008, driving back to Las Vegas from visiting Laurie here in Sierra Vista, sick with a cold, alone, dealing with a car that would unexpectedly stall, I found out that our house sale had fallen through.
R had taken a job in Los Alamos several months earlier and was living in a rental house just outside Santa Fe. Having resigned from a stressful job in Vegas, I had planned to join him and once again become a lady of leisure, enjoying all the many things that Santa Fe had to offer. All the signs had pointed to that plan going ahead: we had found a buyer for our house in Las Vegas, a couple who were also going to buy a lot of our furniture (shades of our moving to Ireland six years ago!) Then literally two days from closing on August 28th, I received a call from our realtor that they had backed out because “the Spirit” had told them it was the wrong thing to do.
Hah! That’s ironic because yesterday it was the Spirit that told me I need to start attending the LDS ward again. But that’s an aside, not going to write about that just yet. I want to get back to reflecting on my journal entries of the past during this time. Yes, fourteen years ago, as I wrote in my journal back then, I was trying to deal with the Las Vegas issue. I remembered that we had been in a similar position before, in 1998 when we were first married.
R had a house in South Carolina that was supposed to sell, giving us some much-needed capital as both of us were unemployed and homeless at the time. I had had to sell my condo in Toronto as I lost my job a week after our marriage and R was waiting on an employment contract in the US. We were quite literally living, with my two cats, on the goodness of friends, sleeping in their basement with what was left of our worldly possessions in a storage unit in Toronto and in the back of R's Ford F150 truck. We drove down to Aiken that November--with the cats as unhappy fellow travelers--expecting to get a check for the proceeds of the sale of the house, which had been rented for the past four years. But the sale fell through on the very day the papers were supposed to be signed, just as we arrived at the realtor's office. "Oh, YOU need to go and force the sale through with the renters," said the notary. The realtor had already done a bunk, heading down to Aruba, anticipating his realtor's fee would be there when he returned. Going over and meeting the renters, seeing the state of the house, I knew that was a hopeless quest. [Note: when we finally DID sell the house three years later, through the property manager, the realtor had the gall to tell me we owed him his original fee. Southern law isn't THAT different and I told him to whistle for it.]
Most of the responsibility fell on me to sort through the problem, even though we had only been married five months and it wasn't MY house, MY history. I had just finagled through selling my condo in Toronto. Heck I’d never even been to South Carolina before I found myself standing in a realtor’s office in Aiken, arguing Northern law vs Southern. [Important note: lest we sound like property czars in all of this, I hasten to say that we have always bought houses under rather large mortgages and the past 25-odd years have seen wide fluctuations in property values, not always to our advantage.]
I lost that argument in Aiken, South Carolina, but I did sort through the situation. Within a few days, I managed to get it into a property management company’s hands and, miracle of all miracles, the long hoped-for call from Richard's job agent came through that he had a contract in Richland, in the state of Washington. Necessitating a mad dash back up to Toronto and the stored worldly goods and a new chapter of life. Fourteen years ago, I followed a similar pattern in Vegas: I managed to get the house into a property management company’s hands, rented it furnished and joined R in Santa Fe in mid September. We eventually, almost exactly three years later, ended up having two rental properties/two mortgages: one in Vegas, one in Santa Fe AND a rental house in Sierra Vista. I think that was the crescendo of our house owning and selling craziness. Before some of you remind me, the sojourn in Ireland doesn't come close to this kind of stress.
And yet, as I continue to read my old journal entries, at around this same time three years ago, R was again agitating to move from Sierra Vista, to sell the house we are still (thank goodness!) living in! Thankfully, during those conversations three years ago, I read this journal and remembered the tremendous stress and strain that went on for months over housing costs, housing insecurity. I put a stop to those conversations. So we still live in this same house, coming up for four years now. The few times that “I wish we lived in England . . . In Canada . . . Anywhere but here” comes up in the conversation I am able to ignore it and not even go there. At least I can say, looking back and looking at the present, that I have learned SOMETHING.
And that's what keeping a journal and looking back on it year after year can do: helps me to appreciate, celebrate where I am now, gives me clues (if things are looking grim) that I have survived before and could survive again. Looking back, those housing experiences taught me to appreciate what I already have. Have taught me that being secure about where I live is something not to be trifled with. Not having THAT to worry about frees me up to think about how to live my life happily and calmly in the present. Not worrying about the future. At least not today.
I love our house, I am thankful for its security. (Even if we do have a mortgage, thanks to swings and roundabouts and buying low, AND keeping it for four years, we have good equity in it.)
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