Weekend Journal – Moving Edition (Part One)

For a variety of really good reasons, we decided to move last January. We called over our gravelly voiced realtor, who said that there was no way that we could sell the house until we fixed the front steps, the upstairs bathroom, and various rough edges in the house. She also told us to get rid of asbestos in the basement. 

I spent four months getting that done, and by April, we had our house on the market. 

The trouble was that the estimated price for the house in December was no longer right once the house went officially on the market. Home values took a nose dive in a couple of months. 

Then came the Era of Long Misery. The last three months have been uber-sucky. The realtor would text me – "House viewing in three hours? TY" So, I would drop whatever I was working on and furiously clean. The last fifteen minutes usually involved pulling the dirty clothes out of the open hamper in the bathroom and shoving them under the bed. Every bed was made. Every light was left on. No crumbs on the stove. Jewelry box hidden. Then I would drive around the town for half an hour until the people  left the house. 

And the uncertainty was a killer. We were never really sure that the house would sell at all. With all the foreclosures on the market and the proximity to the train station, selling our house was never a sure thing. After a month on the market, I assumed that we were staying and signed the kids up for the town soccer league and the town social skills class. We told friends not to worry, and we all pretended that there wasn't a sign on our front lawn. 

Then last week, the agent called to say that a couple wanted to come by for a second look at 5:15. It wasn't a great time to get kicked out of one's house. Jonah gets off his camp bus at 5  and that's when I start making dinner. But we rallied and ran out of the house at 5:15. As I yelled at Jonah to get in the car, I spotted a woman in a SUV down the block watching me from behind sunglasses. 

Jonah and I did chores for an hour. We picked up Ian from speech therapy and went to Fairway to grab a rotisserie chicken for dinner. At 6 :30, Steve called to say that he couldn't go home, because there was a pile of cars outside of the house. I picked him up from a bench in town. With the kids complaining of hunger, we drove around for an hour and got some pizza. At 7:30, we pulled onto our block, as the woman in the black SUV drove off. Five seconds of eye contact.