Domino Rodeo

I’m trapped in a lineup of dominoes that will determine my fate for the near and perhaps distant future. We opened escrow on our house on Tuesday, but the sale is contingent on the buyers selling their house. They are taking aggressive measures (dramatically dropped the price) to sell in the timeframes to which we agreed. Meanwhile, we have found a house that I want to buy. Ron is lukewarm, but I think he’ll come around. Unfortunately for me, the seller of the house I want to buy will not entertain an offer from us until our buyers manage to get their house into escrow. I am the domino in the middle. Since we have nowhere else to go when we sell our house, we could end up on the street. Does anyone have a spare bedroom we can rent (with our cats) until we find a house?

When I first began blogging, a little more than six years ago, we were in the process of coming in off the Ranch. It was a traumatic time of upheaval for me. I loved my home in the forest so dearly and had no desire to leave. Ron’s health forced the issue. After I had to call 911 one night, and it took the paramedics more than 30 minutes to reach us and bail Ron out of a particularly bad hypoglycemic episode, I realized that I had to choose between my husband and my land. On the day that we moved, I cried for a full half an hour on my final drive from the Ranch to our new home here near town.

Having closed the chapter on the Ranch, and making the break, I have not felt much attached to this house. It’s lovely, but has little meaning for me. I sometimes imagine that the spirit of my mother (gone these past nine years) conspired with Ron to find and purchase this house. Ron was enthusiastic about it. It’s not me. The property I wish to buy is so much more suited to me. It’s modest, funky, has a lot of character. It has a mature overgrown yard that was put in place and tended by a woman who clearly loved to garden. She died suddenly of cancer and her son inherited the property, which he is eager to sell. I think I am playing with fire to even write about this desired plot of land since the world of real estate is so terribly fickle and dreams evaporate in an instant. Yet I am visioning a move to this house with the overgrown garden. I surprise myself with these stirrings of attachment to a property that I thought I would never feel again.

According to our realtor, the seller of the property has sent word that he will sell at the price we are offering, but not until our buyers get their house into escrow. Waiting patiently is not one of my virtues; a fact which got me in deep with one of my realtors a couple of days ago. We have two realtors, and that’s a long story. The twitter version is that the older realtor is semi-retired so we worked it out for a young woman who is a friend of our daughter's to be our back-up realtor. She has turned out to be our primary realtor. The older realtor likes to say, “if it’s meant to be then it will happen.” I finally lost my cool with her philosophy the other day and snapped, “that’s a very Christian sentiment, however I prefer to be more proactive.” I hope I didn’t hurt her feelings, but I was burning out on the passive-reliance-on-god aphorisms. Our young realtor is a go-getter and she works hard to make things happen. So do I. The realtor who helped us buy the Ranch in 1991 referred to that deal as “a house exchange rodeo.” Real estate exchanges have never come easy for us. At least they are memorable. We are in a new rodeo.

It seems that my mundane discussion of real estate has degenerated into a theological dissertation on intelligent design, chaos theory, whether or not humans have free will, and the nature of fate. I had not meant to go there. As long as I’m there, though, I might as well ask you to send good thoughts for my real estate transaction to go smoothly, with no cats dying in the making of this sale. Sigh. My philosophy at the moment is LIFE HAPPENS. I hope in this instance it happens in my favor.