TRIAL OF A NOVICE SELLER or I LOVE THAT MY TRACT HOUSE IS CONSIDERED REAL ESTATE

The last time I sold a house I told a prospective buyer she could not look in one of the bedrooms as there was a baby sleeping and thus sacrificed a chance to unload a property in the depressed market of 1983 Michigan. I wouldn’t do that again. Actually, I wouldn’t do any of this again. (Famous last words, right?) Keeping to the baby theme, it occurred to me that preparing a house (with 36 years of skin sloughings, dust, moldering books, furniture, ancient towels and thread-bare sheets) is akin to labor. It doesn’t hurt as much but it lasts longer and you have the same driving wish “I just want to get up and walk away from all this.” I’m sort of joking. The fact is, I’ve met an angel. Bill Moyers said once during an interview that he had been helped in his career by unseen hands. Well, these hands are seen and they are busy. This realtor – a gift from my daughter – is helming the whole, messy process, from getting in competent, efficient repairmen, painters, carpet-layers, etc., to buying new fixtures (updating), to gently suggesting disposal of ancient, rickety things (piano, inherited furniture, broken bookshelves) and then bringing and LOADING a pickup truck to take to GoodWill or the dump – many times, to pruning the bushes, to decorating my house with items I’d never think of in a million years – like a four-foot Buddha. Love that Buddha. I may ask to keep him. My agent (I’ll call her Franci Bissett) offers suggestions, solutions and sympathy whenever they are needed. It was not an easy decision to trade the comfort and familiarity of two generations, the concrete stylings of my children in the driveway, the memories of those family years and a hundred years of furniture passed down from New England to Ann Arbor and Virginia. It was (and is) very, very hard to leave the dearest friends in the world. But Franci and her crew have kept me on track to move forward. And life, apparently, is all about change. Just ask the Buddha.