Something's Off

We need a new dog on the farm. In our family. I was going to wait until after we got back from Florida. The main reason we don’t go away as much as we’d like to is because of the animals. I should say as much as Kurt would like to. My idea of a vacation is to sleep until I wake up. Just wake up whenever I’m done sleeping. No alarm clocks. No shaking me. Then when I finally do open my eyes, don’t get out of my pajamas and have somebody bring me coffee and food, preferably spaghetti, eat, and then go back to sleep. That’s my idea of a vacation. But Kurt and the kid prefer more traditional venues like Disneyworld plus my father abandoned me for all the good weather down there so I’ve got to go.

It’s really hard getting away when you have animals. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t like going away. I get the horse sitter to come twice a day and she’ll fill up the barn cats’ food and go inside and take care of the house cats but I can’t leave a dog alone all day and all night with only two visits from someone. Dogs don’t like to be alone. They’re pack animals. Even if I had two dogs, which we usually do, and they had each other for company, they still have to go to the bathroom more than twice a day in a twenty-four hour period. So I bring the dog(s) to a dog sitter and that can run into big bucks and then on top of it, I always feel guilty because my dogs are not really thrilled about it. Vixen used to give us the cold shoulder when we returned and the last time we went away, poor Motley was traumatized by the dog sitter’s dogs. Even though they are all very nice dogs and they are used to other dogs coming and going because that’s what this lady does for a living. I shouldn’t say he was traumatized by her dogs, plural. It was one dog in particular. A sweet and friendly Great Dane named Daisy. But Motley was scared of her. He couldn’t figure her out because she was as big as our pony but she wasn’t a pony. He knew there was something off about her.

I don’t know if it was the pony-like dog or what, but Motley wasn’t himself when we picked him up and I don’t think he was himself while he was there either because the dog sitter didn’t rave about him like people usually did. Everyone loved Motley. Even the mailman told me that if I ever needed a home for him, he would love to have him. I used to be afraid that people were going to steal him if I turned my back. That’s how nice he was. So I expected the dog sitter to report how impressed she was, how he was the best dog she’d ever taken care of. But she didn’t say squat. I was kind of insulted by her lack of accolades. It was like making someone a gourmet dinner with ingredients you had to search high and low for, exotic this and organic that, and setting up your computer with the recipe on it right on the counter next to the coffee pot so you can follow it to a T and everything looks fabulous, it looks like something out of Bon Appétit magazine, and no one says, “Yum, this is good.”

At any rate, Motley wasn’t himself when we picked him up and in fact, he was never himself again. He was quieter. He started aging fast and we found ourselves cooing, “You good old dog,” and then we’d hit our foreheads and say, “Wait! He’s not old!” He was seven or eight. In the summer, he started panting more than I thought was right. Everyone said, “Oh, it’s hot,” but I knew something was wrong. When I took him to the vet, we found out he had kidney failure. We never found out what caused it. By Christmas, he was dead.

I can’t help wondering if it had something to do with the vaccines the dog sitter required. I didn’t want to do it. I’m not against vaccines. But I think we give too many of them too often and I’ve cut back on the number of vaccines I give to both my animals and my children. The dog sitter was actually on the same page as me about that and she was going to let me slip by with just the kennel cough shot since he had had the whole series about two years ago. But when I was in the vet’s office and the vet asked me if I wanted to do them all, I thought, ah, give them to him. I was scared when I did them and scared when I didn’t. I’ll always wonder if those shots had something to do with it because he was perfectly fine before that. Maybe, with his compromised organs from having the parvo as a puppy, all those shots put him over the edge. I don’t know…

Now it’ll be even harder to go away because I’m not going to put my dogs in any kind of a boarding situation if it means I have to give them vaccines I don’t think is in their best interest. I’m going to have to find someone to stay at the house. That’s not going to be easy. Or cheap. So we were going to wait before we got another dog, do the Florida thing first. But I can’t stop crying. I never cried this much over a dog. It has nothing to do with the fact that I held Motley when we put him to sleep. I held Vixen too and I didn’t cry over her this much. I’m crying over Motley about as much as I cried over my mother! It’s embarrassing! It’s a dog!

Maybe it was because he was by my side practically every waking minute. I went out to take care of the horses, he came out with me. I went back in, he came back in. I went into the bathroom, he padded after me. All through the house, he quietly followed and was always there, sleeping next to the bed (I had to watch when I got up in the morning that I didn’t step on him), under the kitchen table, lying next to the couch, not making a peep except for the thump of his tail if I looked in his direction. I go out now to feed the horses and I feel like I forgot something. I open the door to the house and expect Motley to come barreling out and there’s nothing. It’s like my arm was cut off. Yeah, I’m still functioning with what I have left. But I’m all discombobulated like there’s a pony but it’s not a pony. Something’s off.

So I need another one ASAP. Of course no dog will take Motley’s place. How many best-dog-evers are there? But I know I will feel better if I have another dog to love, especially if I can find one who needs a home. I’ve got to do something with all this dog love that has no place to go right now.

No One Knows Me

Ginger is gone. She went back to Texas. Ginger is one of my blog buddies. I follow her because she was a transplant like me and because I admired how she was trying to make a living farming. She and her family were kind of like hippies (I don’t know if she’d like that characterization but that’s how I thought of her because of the goat cheese, the books, and PBS) and they really lived off the farm. They milked their own cow, grew vegetables, heated with wood, and Ginger sold cake and bread down at the local farm market made with flour she ground herself. She ground it herself. Very hippie-like.

She didn’t know how to do all of these things at first. I imagine she knew how to bake bread, being a hippie and all. But she had to Google how to slaughter a chicken and castrate a bull. I could never slaughter a chicken myself, even if someone actually showed me and I didn’t have to resort to Google, but I appreciated that she did. Not that she killed an animal. It was her lack of hypocrisy. How she was humane and grateful, thanking the animal and taking good care of it. If you have to kill an animal, at least be humane and grateful. But I couldn’t do it even if my heart was in the right place. I think I could castrate a bull though. I’ve seen horses getting done. Afterwards you take the testicles and throw them up on the barn roof for good luck. I don’t know if Ginger threw the testicles up on the roof.

Everything was going well, as well as can be expected on a farm with goats getting out and weeds coming in and whatnot, and then Ginger’s husband Philip died. He was from New Jersey, like me. He and Ginger met in school and she also lived in Jersey for a time, until they moved here. That’s how we started talking, yakking on e-mails in between the blogging. She lived in Jersey, I lived in Jersey. She lived in Texas. I lived in Oklahoma. That was close! When you’re out in the middle of nowhere and you don’t know anybody, you’ll latch on to any little shred of something you have in common even if the link is as precarious as being from neighboring states.

But after a while, Ginger didn’t reply to e-mails. I don’t think it was me. She was busy with her church friends. (She was a hippie but she was also from Texas.) Besides castrating animals and butchering chickens, church is the other thing people do out in the country. They get religious. I’ve even seen it with my own friends who left New Jersey and moved to the country and all of a sudden they’re thanking Jesus on their Facebook and saying prayers for everyone who has anything whatsoever wrong like their car won’t start or a horse got kicked. I myself turned to it as well, even though I felt like a fraud. Then I quit when the pastor called gay people evil. But that’s a whole other story—how I found religion and lost it just as quick.

I understand why people are drawn to it. When you’re in the country and there is no neighborhood bar or crowd of mothers holding the hands of backpacked kids waiting for the school bus on every corner, when you are in a place that’s so remote (if you can count having Internet and Dish TV and everything a person could want at her fingertips down at the Minute Market as being remote), that you calculate the cost of a tank of gas and the time getting there in deciding whether it’s worth joining the book club or even going shopping, and the only sounds you hear are the birds and your own voice if you test it now and then by clearing your throat or talking to the dog, the only people you see are the mailman and Eldon on his tractor or Pearl when she brings you something—a pie, cucumbers, a flyer for vacation bible school—you need something. Church, out in the country, is the community. All activities come packaged with the church. The spaghetti dinner? It’s down at the church. The kids are going to the water park. It’s sponsored by the church. The bluegrass festival? It’s in the pastor’s field. You need to find a good plumber? Ask Ray about it in church on Sunday.
And so when Philip died, Ginger’s church friends rallied around her. I wanted to go and visit her when I heard. But I wondered if the death of one’s husband was a good time for blog buddies to meet in real life. Plus I knew she didn’t need me. Her freezer was jam-packed with enough meals the church ladies made to last for God knows how long and all the church husbands were stocking her up with wood and fixing her fences. They even helped outfit her kitchen with an industrial oven so that she could bake bread efficiently and make a living without Philip.

When my mother died, a few months later, Pearl brought me over a pie and took me to a flea market to get me out. She even helped me rescue some rusty old motel chairs discarded behind an old barn that I had my eyes on for years, which I later sanded and painted, saving them from the Dumpsters and making them look cute on my porch.
I’m grateful to her for that. But that was it. I don’t go to church so I had no other support system. Almost immediately I wanted to go home. My mother wasn’t there anymore but I was suddenly very homesick for where she’d been, for the people who knew her and would be shocked when they ran into me at the supermarket and I told them she died (she died—it still doesn’t sound real), and for all the things I took for granted that were linked to her, to my family, to me—the ocean, ticking spinning wheels at the boardwalk, taverns with diamond-shaped windows in the doors, stoops, docks, shamrocks, doo-wop, Bruce Springsteen, lobstermen, Italian bakeries, Soprano accents, Elk’s conventions, the tunnel, the garden, handball, skeeball, stickball, Hoboken, the Statue of Liberty, even the New Jersey Turnpike.

I remember when the turnpike was being built. My sister, annoying as always, called it the “turnapipe.” The pavement was brand new, bright and white and surrounded by crow-weeds and cattails like a road in a state park going to the beach. And it did in fact go to the beach; it went down-the-shore, to Keansburg, to the little town where we rented a bungalow in the summer. When we passed the real estate office that was shaped like a ship in Laurence Harbor, we knew we were almost there. And there was my mother, only 24-years-old, driving her 1968 Dodge Charger with the black stripe on the back end, Crystal Blue Persuasion playing on the radio, and three kids in the back seat kicking each other, vying for a window.

There is no one around here for me to tell this to. People smile and nod when I tell them how she loved her cars—a red Mustang, a gold Cadillac, the Charger, a two-toned Grand Prix that looked like it belonged to a pimp, to name a few—and how she was a flaming redhead until she got sick—this was no old lady who got leukemia and died! But no one around here knows her. No one really knows me.

I imagined that Ginger was having it even worse. She lost her husband, her partner on the farm. How would she manage without him? At least I didn’t have to worry about that. How would she castrate the bulls? Did she even know how to use a chainsaw? (For firewood, not the bulls.) Could she drive the tractor? What if the truck doesn’t start? She had it doubly bad. And with kids too.

But she seemed to be doing it. She got the oven. She planted seeds. They even wrote an article about her in the newspaper. They called her “the mighty widow.” Everyone was impressed by Ginger. Because, let’s face it, it would be hard to make a living on a farm with a husband, never mind without one. Yes, she was heartbroken about Philip and blogged about sitting on the deck at night all by herself, looking at the stars, listening to the whippoorwills and thinking about him. But she was getting on.

I was surprised. I thought she was going to go back to Texas as soon as the funeral was over. And jealous. I was not getting on. I suddenly hated it here. I didn’t even ride my horses anymore because all I wanted to do was go home. We put the house up for sale and I dedicated myself to selling it. Dedicated is too mild a word. I’m obsessed. Fixated. All I do is work at keeping up with it, cleaning it, improving it, marketing it.

I wished I could be like Ginger, and still like it here, still get all teary-eyed over the mountain view that is so beautiful it looks fake; I wish I was still tickled when Eldon, in his straw hat and overalls, waves to me when he drives past the house on his tractor, or I see the filly across the road sticking her head through the fence trying to get some clover that is somehow more delectable than the knee-deep grass she’s standing in. Like she’s doing right now, as I type this. But I don’t care about any of it anymore. Since my mother died.

If I went to church, I’d probably feel better because I wouldn’t feel so alone here. I’d have a community. But I’m not going to church for that reason. And so I suffer in silence, posting ad after ad for this house, thinking up creative ways to get it sold, analyzing, scrutinizing, second-guessing myself about why it’s not and what’s going to happen—am I stuck down here?—am I going to get cancer like my mother and die down here all alone?—and not living in the now, not being present and enjoying my life, because all I’m doing is dreaming of home and figuring out ways to get there.

Then, to make matters worse, Ginger up and left. First she started blogging about it. She decided to do it. She was leaving. Going home to Texas. In a way, I felt relieved. I was not crazy wanting to leave such a beautiful place after all. Even though she had all those church friends, that wonderful community who supplied her with wood and fixed her leaks, in the end, she still wanted to go home too. I warned her it was going to take time to sell her farm. I offered to send some of my prospects her way. She didn’t take me up on it. Such confidence! (She had no idea how bad the real estate market is.) Then I read about how she was planning to leave in the summer so she could get the kids settled in before school starts in September. I thought, good luck with that. I figured for sure I would be out of here before she was, but then the next thing I knew, even without selling the farm, she left. Poof. Gone.

And now I’m even more jealous. How come she can leave and I can’t? Well, technically the reason is because I have to sell my house and she didn’t. I don’t know why she didn’t have to sell her house. Maybe she got life insurance money when Philip died. Maybe she just doesn’t care and she simply abandoned it. I don’t know. Doesn’t matter.

What matters is I have to stop white-knuckling it because I can’t force it to happen. I have to find peace and acceptance, like it seemed Ginger had, when she was here, and when she left, so I can live in the now. Because the now is all I have. Stop the obsessive cleaning and fixing. Stop cutting the grass with a toenail scissors like they tell you to do on Designed to Sell. Start riding my horses again. Go back to the clubs. Take a good look at that mountain behind the hay field.

And maybe get a hold of some testicles to throw up on the roof.

House Hunting

We looked at a bunch of houses before we started getting worried. There was the log cabin that had views of the nuclear reactor from the front porch. That wasn’t even the reason we rejected it. Though it was surrounded by beautiful farms with silos and fishing boats in the yards and reminded me of Misty of Chincoteague, and I love log cabins, the town itself was a ghetto. I’m talking gangland ghetto. Let’s put it this way. Even though I come from Jersey City, I was scared when we were in McDonald’s. Kelly would have to go to school with these kids. I bet all the farmers’ kids who were stuck between the ghetto and the bay where their families had crabbed or farmed for generations, were homeschooled, and the farm families were cringing at what grew up around them like weeds on the other side of a fence. I liked the house and the neighborhood so much, for a split second, I not only dismissed the nuclear reactor but I wondered if I could homeschool Kelly. Then I remembered that I don’t even know my times-tables so that was out.

There was the old stone house with the bathroom in the middle of the bedroom with a shower curtain that you pull around the toilet for privacy and all the plaster falling off the ceilings and walls in all the bedrooms upstairs, plus a kitchen that needed to be totally gutted. It had great acreage, even more than I have here, and we might have considered fixing it up if it wasn’t so overpriced.

There was the house on a busy road in a bad part of town that was too small and didn’t have enough acreage even if we didn’t care about living within walking distance of a check cashing place and a dollar store.

There was the house that the sellers refused to let anyone see.

There was the house next to the power lines. (It wouldn’t stop me. I don’t like it but power lines are a good place to ride—you can ride for miles and miles. But Kurt says no on the power lines.)

One possibility was the newer ranch house in pristine condition on twelve beautiful pasture acres that you could move right into. The house wasn’t old, like I wanted, but it was practical. My father would approve. It was a little small but it had a full basement, a den, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator. It had a carport for the dually and a fenced-in backyard for the dog. It was nice. But there’s always a downside to everything in our price range. It was on a busy road. Somewhat of a highway. A country highway. But a highway nonetheless. On the good side, you could have horse shows there. That’s something I was actually looking for—a place that would be conducive to having horse shows. It would help to pay the high New Jersey property taxes. It would even be a good place to build a warehouse for our flooring business. Tractor trailers would be able to access it. But it was also overpriced. They’d have to come down. We filed this away as a back-up house—something we’d buy just to get up there and maybe sell later if we couldn’t stand the road. Maybe it wouldn’t bother us. You never know. It’s not something we wanted to do, buy a back-up house—we’re tired and are sick of moving. But we had to find a house.

There was the house in historic Smithville. Smithville! Smithville is one of the reasons I want to move back to Jersey! Smithville is a little village of shops on cobblestone streets that sell gourmet coffees, homemade pies and chocolate, candles, antiques, pottery, lavender-scented lotions, homemade goat soap, I Love Lucy collectibles, restored Schwinn bicycles, incense, beads, rocks, shells, Violets candy and Bazooka gum, vintage toasters, movie posters, and wind chimes. It’s where I got my magic wand from.

I love Smithville! When we left New Jersey, I thought the whole Virginia was going to be like Smithville. But I haven’t found anything like that here. As soon as we moved back to Jersey, I was going to go to Smithville right away and get some chocolate-covered strawberries and maybe a piece of rose quartz for my rock collection. So I was excited when I realized the next house on the list was actually in Smithville!


The listing said “dry basement,” but this one had the wettest basement of them all. We actually might have considered it just for the location alone, but like most of them, it needed way too much work for what they were asking. Overpriced with a capital O.

We ruled out handyman specials in worse shape than the winery house, houses that needed to be burned down, houses on small acreage,
a house next to a gas station, a house that used to be a truck terminal, foreclosures and short sales (they take too long), and a house that was so far down at the bottom of New Jersey that I might as well stay in Virginia, that’s how long it would take me to run up to the family’s for a cup of coffee or to take my father to a doctor’s appointment.

We were worried.

And then we found the Alloway house.

Practicing to Be a Cool Old Lady

I don’t want anybody to be shocked when they see me when I go back to Jersey. I’ve really aged in the last year. It’s probably from the stress of losing my mother plus I turned fifty and I’m going through menopause. All of a sudden I have wrinkles all over the place and I’ve got this paunch in the middle that I see a lot of middle-aged women get. I’m not too worried about the paunch. I’ve watched all the women in my family get it when they went through menopause and then when they were done with the changes, a few years later, they got skinny again. I ride horses and take care of this whole farm myself so I’m not too worried about it. I’m very active. But the wrinkles. They’re not going away.

What bothers me about it is what other people are going to say. They will whisper, “Oh, what happened to Debi?” And “Debi looks terrible!” I know I look tired. I feel tired. I feel like I’ve been through the mill these last few years. If it wasn’t for what other people are going to think, I really wouldn’t care too much. It’s not like I’m going to let myself go. I’ll have blonde hair on my deathbed. But you can’t control everything.

The problem is, they haven’t seen me for eight years. We all age and I know they have wrinkles too. But they’ve seen each other regularly so I’m sure they don’t notice it in themselves like they’ll notice it in someone who they still think of as being forty-two years old, the age I was when I left. And then I’ll show up and I’ll be fifty. It’s like when someone dies. You always picture them the age they were when you lost them. But I’m coming back. And yeow! It’ll be a shock.

But who cares? I’m going to be a cool old lady. I knew this was going to happen sooner or later so I figured I better find a way to accept it. If I can’t look like a hot number when I’m old, at least I can be fun and make people smile. You know, like a Betty White type. So I’m practicing. One time I took a sip of water and spit it at Kelly. Got her right in the head too. I also race her up the stairs and I beat her because I cheat—the trick is I hold her until I get ahead of her. It helps if the dog’s involved because he grabs her by the ankles.

We talk with English accents. I encourage her to call me “Mum” and we stop whatever we are doing whenever Russell Brand comes on the TV so we can study him and make people chuckle. (They often chuckle in England whereas we Americans tend to laugh or giggle.) Today in Cato’s, Kelly held up a shirt and I exclaimed, “That’s quite lovely!” Kelly said, “I know Mum. It’s splendid, isn’t it?” Kurt told the clerk, “They’re not really British you know.”

I’ve also been practicing in Walmart. It’s so dreary in there—what better place to spread some joy? I always talk to everyone anyway. Now I go out of my way to do it.

I make a point of using the cashier’s name. “Thanks a lot Ruby. You have a great day.” They always look surprised that I read their name tag and used their name. Like it actually took effort. You get easy credit for this one.

I make jokes to strangers in the aisles. “Now if only I could hit the lottery I could buy some meat to go with all these snacks!” (We’re big on snacks in this house; hence the paunch mentioned earlier.)

I always stop and chat with the greeters because they get a bad rap. Like that’s an easy job. I’m fifty and I couldn’t stand on my feet all day long like they do. Most of them are senior citizens and they don’t even let them sit down. Why can’t they say hello from a stool? Why isn’t there a stool on the side so they can at least take a load off when no one comes in?

And I try to be helpful. “I get the store brand salsa,” I told a woman who looked confused, her hand hovering back and forth between the Pace and Chi-Chi’s. “The lime and garlic,” I advised. “It’s delicious and you get a lot more for the money.”

One time I had such a long conversation with a woman on line at the deli counter that I found out she’d lost a child and she was raising her grandchild, the state where she was from, the kind of work her husband did, her middle name and why she was named that, what kind of cold cuts she was buying and the theme for the party she was throwing on Saturday. She was wearing a butterfly pendant on a gold necklace. I didn’t tell her about my mother. You know, and how she loved butterflies. I didn’t have to because I felt so good making that lady feel good, that’s what I was busy doing. When she got her order, she reached out and squeezed my arm. “It was so nice talking to you!”

All day long I felt good. I noticed, when I looked in the rearview mirror driving home, that I was smiling. And there in the corner of my eyes were big crow’s feet. And somehow, they didn’t look so bad.

Good News and Bad News

View of our neighbor's farm.

There’s good news and bad news. The good news is, I’ve been getting a bunch of inquiries about the farm. The bad news is, nothing is happening with any of them. I have a couple of people from northern Virginia who have told me they are going to come down to look at the place but they haven’t yet. I have a couple from other states who have said they’re coming, but they haven’t yet either. A few—I don’t know where they’re from—ask me questions and I get excited because I have the right answers.

For example, “How much of the property is fenced?”

Yay! “All of it is fenced and cross-fenced, and a lot of it is board fencing—hard to find around here.”

And, “What are the neighbors like?”

Oh, good one! “The neighbors are gifts from god! They are one reason I don’t want to leave this place. Pearl and Eldon will bring you a pie when you move in, plus they’ll watch your animals whenever you go away. They’re friendly but they won’t bother you. You can’t ask for better neighbors.”

But it doesn’t matter how good the answers are. I never hear from them again.

Then I have one who is local. They did a drive-by and then they e-mailed me. They love the place. Love it! But they have to sell their place first. I have one from up in Maine who begged, “Don’t sell it to anyone else! I want it! But I have to settle some business first.” Whatever that means. Then I have a lady who wasn’t planning to move until she retires in four years but she stumbled upon my place and wants to know if it would be possible to lease it out? As a matter of fact I’ve gotten, four, count them, four people who’ve asked me if they could lease it. Plus Pearl and Eldon will keep an eye on it. Please see the above about our wonderful neighbors.

One of the people who inquired about the farm is now a friend of mine. She is not in the position to buy it, but we got to yakking on e-mail and then we got to yakking on the phone and I now have a new friend in Georgia.

I’ve even gotten another offer on it. The only people who came to see it since my deal fell through offered us the full asking price like the first people. They even admitted they were looking at it before I lowered the price and were prepared to pay that. Shoot. However, and this is a big however, they have to sell their place too. I understand I might have to take a house-selling contingency. I wanted the seller of the winery house to take a house-selling contingency from me. So I understand that. But I know that my house is going to sell. I’m in control—I know I priced it right (in fact, it’s now underpriced, reduced even below the appraisal), and I know how to market it. I have it advertised all over the place: Realtor.com, Land-and-Farm, FSBO, Owners.com, Virginia Equestrian, Virginia Horse Journal, Horse Talk, Horse News, Homes Now, HorseTopia, HorseClicks, Equine.com, Lands-of-America, Craig’s List, Facebook, you name it. I also put flyers everywhere. We even created its own website, www.SmithMountainLakeHorseProperty.com, with tons of pictures and information. This is not the first rodeo I’ve been in. This is the fifth place I’m selling by-owner. If there is anyone out there who needs a little horse farm in this price range and who is actually capable of buying it, I’m going to sell it.

But how do I know my buyer is going to do a good job selling his house if I take a contingency? I have no control over what they do to get their place sold. What if they don’t put their all into it like we do? What if they have a real estate agent who just collects listings, sits back and does nothing, hoping it’ll sell itself and if it doesn’t, well, no skin off his nose? So we called the agent to see if we could get a feeling for how things were going to go.

“Well,” he yawned. “It’s in the MLS and we run ads in the newspaper and we’re going to have an open house.”

Big whoop.

Next we took a ride and looked at their place ourselves. It’s a nice new ranch house but it’s on a main road plus the property is wooded and hilly. Which is exactly the reason they liked ours. You have to walk way down to get to their barn and they’d love to have a real riding arena. On top of that, they were next door to a trailer with a blue tarp, torn and shredded, dangling from the roof and flapping every time the wind blew. There were dogs on chains around the trees in the front yard and stainless steel bowls, dented and upside down, were scattered about. My heart sank. I was hoping this was going to be it and we could take their offer. We looked at the comps just to be sure but I don’t have any confidence they’re going to sell that place for a long time. They’re going to have to drop their price about fifty grand, maybe more. I had to tell them to come back when they’re under a solid contract.

So I’ve got all these bites but nothing’s happening. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Eventually I’m going to sell it and then all of a sudden they’re all going to come out of the woodwork, suddenly they’ll all be ready and they will be heartbroken that they missed it. This always happens when I’m selling my places. Only this time, due to the market we’re in, it’s just taking a little longer. I want to tell them hurry up, hurry up, you’re not going to find anything better than this in this price range… But of course I can’t. They’ll think I’m desperate. They won’t believe me.

In the meantime, I am officially out of contract on the winery house. The seller finally signed the release forms and they are sending my earnest money back. This is good news and bad news too. It’s bad because the house is freed up now and even though giving me a house-selling contingency wouldn’t have stopped her from selling it to someone else (if someone made an offer, she would have asked us if we were ready to perform and if we still couldn’t close, she could have taken the new offer), it might have prevented other people from looking at it when they found out it was under contract.

But it’s also good because we could renegotiate when we do find a buyer for this place and who knows, maybe get the winery house cheaper. I’ve learned some things about it—taxes are even higher than I was told, homeowner’s insurance is going to be practically impossible to get… Also, it’s possible we might find something that’s even better. Trying to look on the bright side. Because I am heartbroken I might miss it just like all the people who inquired about my place are going to be if they miss mine.