All Over the Place

With our house days from going on the market, my husband and I decided to look at a 'property' today, in hopes of stirring up some affection for the task of making another home.

I knew the place was a long shot, but under what my friend/realtor's husband called the "faux Hispano-Moorish décor"—picture three-quarter-sized suits of armor, knives and pistols, glass decanters, nonfunctional weldware—were, I hoped, good bones. I knew the foundation was concrete block (wishful thinking: thermal mass!), there were a couple of interesting masonry fireplaces and potentially good light, and a peaceful siting across the road from a creek that reminds me of my childhood summer home. The 70s makeover of a 50s structure, with its wall-to-wall shag, iron-and-colored-glass chain lamp, and glitter stucco, all brought back my youth. I thought of Nixon resigning, of gas siphoning and the energy crisis, and of the Jackson 5 cartoon show.

After an hour of knocking on cheap paneling, poking at acoustic ceiling to see what lay beneath, sniffing for mold, and mentally reconfiguring the layout, I realized that the first 100K would solely address aesthetic issues. That would leave little dough for potential structural issues (flat roof, a leak at the foundation, the unknown?) and sustainability investments (geothermal, solar, rain catchment...all the stuff we didn't get to in our present house but feel is essential next time out). Photo above right: here I discover that what I thought was cedar shake with an unfortunate coat of white paint is actually a plastic facsimile thereof.

I also felt I was kind of in Lalaland even to consider home ownership and all its uncertainties. It was a big relief to come home to the solid plaster walls and massive beams in this admittedly oversized but exquisitely crafted house. At the moment, I can't bear to think about leaving. The endless thought experiments ennervate me.

Through the day I exchanged emails with a friend who is a professor. I mentioned the difficulty of inhabiting these different scenarios, and he corrected me, pointing out that "inhabit" is an interesting word that inappropriately conjures images of stability. He wrote:

what i see in me and other people right now, is a struggle to learn the new rules of the game. it's more fluctuating in disbelief between positions and states of mind rather than inhabiting these places. in some cases, people are quite desperate and very angry as they have lost jobs and about to lose their homes. my students this past 2 semesters were all over the place, unable to concentrate or think properly.

After we looked at the house we went to our friends'/realtor's cabin a dozen lots up the road and sat on their porch overlooking the creek. We decided that the most suitable role for the building we had just carefully considered, and rejected, would be as headquarters for the Society for Creative Anachronism, and maybe not just because of the heraldry paraphernalia. The sense of chronological misplacement on entering rooms reminiscent of the decade when I was growing up, distracted by worries about an economy compared to, but less gentler and more absurdly abstract than, the Depression of my parents' childhood, with the miniature medieval gewgaws all about, was soulspinning.

We are not among the desperate, and we know it's happenstance that put us in good digs. I do feel angry though—most of all on behalf of the above-mentioned students or people who have been foreclosed on rather than helped to stay in their homes, or those taxed out of houses on one hand while being told they can't have renters on the other. What good is an increasing vacancy rate to anyone?