Getting Ready to Move Last weekend, I put my house up for sale. I’m not moving from Crestline—just moving from this place. I have a boy who is graduating from high school this year, a little girl who is going on to middle school next school year and who will be college age in just six years, and a little boy who is only four years on her heels. It was just a good time to get all of the bills paid off, build a nest egg and maybe find a little smaller nest. In the spring of 1998, when we first started looking for places up here, my Mother had just died after a hard two years of fighting cancer, and my Dad was deteriorating emotionally because he couldn’t deal with the fact that his mission in life for the past two years, and the love of his life, had been taken from him. So at first we were looking for a place that would hold all of us, and one of the first places we found was this one. It needed some work, but it was big. In June of that year, seven months to the day after my Mother had died, my Dad just gave up one night in a behavioral health ward in San Diego. There was no physical reason that he would have died that night, and nobody ever dies in behavioral health—they usually just get happier and more well-adjusted by the day—but my Dad is proof that the mind is a powerful thing. There was still a chance that my eldest son would come down from Northern California to live with us, which he eventually did for a year, and we had grown attached to this place, so we bought it. I have a lot of great memories of this house and I put a lot of sweat into it. But as I learned when I camped out here throughout the evacuation, it’s just a house, and it takes the whole family in it to make it a home. That is probably one of the reasons that my wife and I underestimated the reaction of our two little ones to the news. You couldn’t find a mom in this world that is more attuned to her kids’ feelings than my wife, but even she was surprised at the grief expressed by our children when she told them we were putting the house up for sale. After all, this is the only house my 7-year-old can remember living in, and my 11-year-old’s memories of living anywhere else are dimming. They offered up their allowances and small bank accounts to keep us from doing it. They even started setting up a little lemonade stand outside. But they’ll get to help us pick the next house out, and they’ll forget about leave this house behind in all of the excitement. We picked the same real estate agent we had when we bought the house. He’s a good guy, and he even reads this column sometimes. When we signed the agreement he said, “By signing this agreement you also agree not to mention me in your column, right?” O.K., a deal’s a deal—I won’t mention his name. You have to change your whole life around when you know that a real estate agent is going to be bringing people through your house all of the time. In my home office, I have a really liberal policy when it comes to spiders. Their webs usually occupy all six corners of the room. (Hey, I like to keep the door open and the spiders keep the gnats from buzzing around my ears!) However, when people are coming through, you can’t have your workplace looking like the office of Herman Munster. So I even had to dust once I got all of the cobwebs out of the corners. But someone has it in for me with this idea of selling. My question is, why does this weather thing always happen in late March or the first week of April? It’s Monday and it got up to about 80 today. People were running around all over town in shorts. I just looked at the NOAA site to see what the weather is going to be like for my potential buyers on the first day of selling next weekend, and this is what I see: SATURDAY...MOSTLY
CLOUDY. CHANCE OF RAIN AND SNOW. LOCALLY WINDY. HIGHS 46 TO 56 That’s going to be a good advertisement, eh? Say goodbye to the daffodils. Good, though—let it snow. |
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