It was good.
Bluuurph!
I was out the door and walking across the parking lot when I realized I had no limp. Wow! First time since my knee surgery three months ago. Funny what happens when you’re distracted from your problems. Swimming some lengths in the local pool fixed that limp; it’s back. I drove home from the pool into a cloudless sunrise. On the corner an old man with a lab pup signalled which way he was going so as to keep me from waiting for nothing. A considerate citizen! He got a thumbs up from me. My morning medication routine produced a blood sugar reading which was lowest ever. Incredible! A perfect morning.
We’re deep within the rushing current and back eddies of selling and buying homes. A building inspectors is coming in a few minutes to look at our present abode, Monday repeats the process on the new one. Well, it IS 67 years old. Properly built with old growth full dimension wood, (A2x4 is actually a full 2” by 4”). Floors are built with diagonally-nailed planks. Nothing but solid lumber everywhere.
I prefer that to the new slap-dash houses which are built entirely from OSB board, stapled together in the pouring rain and then put up for sale at an unbelievably high price. When we arrived on Vancouver Island forty years ago, houses sold at an average price of $40,000. Now the number has risen to $750,000. Has our money become worth that much less? I guess there is no point in asking questions that have no clear answers. The people we’re told to trust can’t, or won’t, answer them either. I still choose to believe we live in one of the best places on the planet. We’re still free to leave. Nobody is shooting at us yet.
This morning the rain is hammering down. Someone must be building a house out there. Haar! The moving process goes on with one more thing and then one more thing. The tedium builds. There are a few more days until both the sale and the purchase “close” and the agreements are inscribed in stone. Then we sit and wait until moving day when “possession” occurs and we then have a few hours to move our stuff from beneath one roof to beneath another. In the meantime boxes of stuff rise. We’re moving about three blocks. It is as much work as moving across the country. Bets on which day it will rain?
There was a time when all I owned fit in my backpack. Then it got to be the back of a pickup truck and half of that was tools. We’re like crows sitting on a wire. Too busy looking for something else shiny to peck at, we’re completely unaware that fifty thousand volts are running between our toes.
Finally the macrame trail of paper work is complete. I’m now sitting at my desk in someone else’s home. My house is now around the corner and down the street. It is still almost a month until we can make the move. Hurry up and wait. Somewhere in that time there is an election but there is no-one I want to vote for. But I will, if only to renew my bitching license.
Both deals are now fully completed. “SOLD” stickers are on the For Sale signs out on the street. Let the packing begin. What’ve we been keeping these for? Stuff!
Home is where the heart is…even if you can’t remember which box you packed it in.