We put our house up for sale in a down market, one of the worst to come along in years.
Everywhere we turned, we heard nothing but pessimism, doom, and gloom.
Real encouraging, news media types, thanks. I can't imagine why people have low hopes for the economy.
Anyway, from the week after we put the house on the market until this past week, we had a steady stream of realtors and prospective buyers.
We also had a few offers. Many of them were very, very low -- people hoping we were desperate to sell.
Not so. We actually have until the end of summer.
But finally, someone came along who saw the house for what it was -- a home. An acre yard, an open plan, a friendly neighborhood.
Last week, on the 19th, we got a fair offer for the house. The realtor came and presented it himself. That's class.
By the 20th, we had responded with a counter offer. The deal was made, and from that day forward . . . to me, the house is already someone else's.
That's not a bad thing. Sometimes it's difficult to let go.
The deal is on, and the clock is ticking. Our time in Gainesville is tumbling out of the hourglass like so much sand.
Today was the home inspection. As you can see below, I did what I've been doing for the past month: evacuated. See, we have these two extremely large, friendly, and fluffy dogs with a low bark threshhold. It's not really considered polite to have your big furballs giving the home inspector a bark-down the entire time he's in the house. He'd probably recommend we pad the walls.
For the past month, I've been leaving the house with the dogs, so that realtors and prospective buyers could tour the place unimpeded. Maybe that's the point where the house stopped feeling like mine. There were only a few days that the evening went by without at least one visitor -- and without at least one evacuation.
The problem is, there's nowhere to go. The dogs are too huge to go most places; it's too hot to hang around outside. We tried to find shady places to walk and to rest.
One of my favorites was the campus of a local community college, which happens to be directly across the interstate from my house. I actually taught Chemistry there, back in the day -- funny to think all the side paths I've walked.
Anyway, hopefully, these are some photos from one of the last evacuations.
#1 and #3 are scenes from the campus. #2 shows Nora. #4 is Neri, sending out a maximum burst of cute rays at some passers-by. She just loves new people -- what a social butterfly.
And then there's picture #5.
The tree is much older than I am. At one point it lived in a forest; now it stands alone on its own island in the middle of a parking lot. It probably remembers my ancestors. Maybe it was a seedling 400 years ago, in 1608. It outlived the original inhabitants of the region; it survived the arrival of the Spanish, the coming of the Americans, the Civil War, and decades of industrial revolution. Today it stands less than 100 yards from a modern computer science building. And within 1000 yards of my house.
For years, I've called the tree Old Ygg. Short for Yggdrasil, the World Tree from Norse mythology, and also the name of the tree planted at the halfway point between order and chaos (in Roger Zelazny's Amber series).
Maybe that's where I'm standing now.
Time to walk a new Pattern.
