The first two groups of prospective buyers came through today, if what our real estate agent told us is true. Tomorrow we get the whole Caldwell Banker Office walking through and another potential buyer at noon. It feels very strange, as if our lives are on display. I know that they are looking at the rooms, not our personal paraphernalia, but I’m sure that they see a book here, a magazine there, etc. I hope they aren’t peeking in the medicine cabinets. Nah, there’s probably not time for that.
To prepare for this onslaught of browsers, we’ve cleaned up a lot. We’d already been through something like this before, when we were considering swapping this place for a similar unit across the courtyard. “The key to selling a house”, our realtor at that time said “is to have it look as empty as you can. Lots of empty surfaces. Let the buyer imagine themselves in your space.” Well, we are far from empty, but it is a lot tidier. My office is the only area that is still full of clutter, and even there I’ve cut it back to just the desks. I’ll get it down to desk level, but that will take a few more days. Most of this was achieved through filling boxes with what I could not throw out and taking those boxes to our storage room in Lynn, MA. If Pam said our place felt like a Hotel room after Socrates was gone, it certainly feels a lot more like one now.
Pam also did a bit of landscaping in our back yard. I use the term back yard loosely; the tiny postage stamp of a back area we have behind our townhouse is roughly a 12 by 20 foot plot with a dogwood tree (hurt badly a few years ago from an ice storm but recovering slowly), azalea and lilac bushes on one side, and a few tulips (and later in the fall, wild chrysanthemums) on the other, with some stone and weeds in between. So, Pam took down what had to be the ugliest plastic shelving I’ve ever seen that we had up for a year or two for our houseplants to during the summer and planted 9 boxwood bushes at the back. We set up a bright red folding table and matching chairs we got from IKEA back in the Mesozoic and it almost looks OK. At any rate the scene no longer looks like an empty lot.
All this means that no matter what, we are pulling up anchor and moving on. I have this feeling in my gut that I haven’t had in a long time, the same as I felt when I was ready to leave Rochester, NY at the end of my graduate school studies there: Impatience, like itching powder in my head. I just want the whole thing to be done, but there are many i’s to dot and t’s to cross. We have to try and take care of all the details because we are not just moving across town, or even to Providence or Connecticut. We’re leaving the whole damned country.
Did I say damned? Oh yes, when Anne Coulter is on the cover of this week’s Time Magazine, with a puff piece interview inside about how she ‘blushes’ and rants on about how she’s glad that liberals hate her because we are so evil, etc. Damned is what the country is, and they can have Ms. Coulter and the sick bile that she vomits into the culture all they want.
