Yee-haw! We Closed!

Making Hay Instead of Making Loans

I know you’re sick of it, but this is what’s happening:

We have a new date for the closing. At least I think we do. It’s November 30. That’s a week away. Since past experience has shown me that Slow Bob’s bank says they are going to close but then they don’t, I thought I better double-check. And since Ellen, the loan officer at Bob’s bank doesn’t return my phone calls, even though it’s in our contract that his bank should keep me informed and apprised just as if I were a real estate agent brokering the deal, I decided to shoot her an e-mail. I thought why get aggravated when I get her voice mail and she doesn’t call me back? So I e-mailed. I said I just wanted to confirm that the closing is set for Wednesday. She said, “As far as I know it’s scheduled.”

As far as I know?!

Tell me I’m not asking for anything crazy! Tell me I’m not expecting too much! Is it too much to expect the loan officer to know whether it’s on or not? Is it too much to expect her to get up off her ass and find out?! Is it too much to expect the buyer to actually abide by the contract, a contract the loan officer helped him write?!

Not that it’s Bob’s fault. That I know of. Forget Slow Bob. It’s Slow Banks in Virginia. I’ve realized it’s a Virginia bank thing. Because of all the transactions I’ve had buying and selling houses, buying and selling the Keansburg house, buying and selling the Jackson house, Oklahoma, Ferrum, and now this, ten transactions in all, the only time there was a problem with a house closing on time was when a Virginia bank was involved in a mortgage. Ten closings, two involving Virginia mortgages. Eight on time. The two involving Virginia mortgages not.

The last time this happened, bad, but not quite as bad as now, was when we were getting a mortgage to buy the Ferrum house. We had just traveled two days from Oklahoma and pulled up in front of the Ferrum house towing a trailer with dogs, cats, a fish, a kid, the computers, all our valuables and jewelry, with the moving trucks a half day behind us, and were told, standing on the curb thinking we had made it and the worst was over, exhausted, dirty, dehydrated, that the Virginia bank wasn’t ready to close. Two days earlier when we left our old house, the house we could have stayed in longer if we’d known we had no where to live, there was no problem. But now, suddenly, for some reason no one ever explained, they couldn’t do it. Couldn’t close. Sorry. No go. You’ll have to find a motel. I’m sure you can find a motel on such short notice that will allow all those animals. Oh, all the stuff that’s coming tomorrow morning on the moving trucks? Storage. Yeah that’s right. Storage. That’s what they have that for!

Luckily it didn’t come to that and I can actually say one nice thing about the Evils. Since they’d already moved out, they allowed us to move in before the closing. It took the bank two weeks, two weeks until they were finally able to close, and the Evils made our lives a living hell for the favor, but that’s another story. At least we weren’t homeless. The point is, the Virginia bank caused this. For no reason.

And so experience tells me not to count on the bank. Perhaps they get delayed because the loan officer has to make hay—that actually happened with Kip, Buyer Number Two—the loan officer’s voice mail said that’s where he was when no one could reach him all week to find out if Kip was getting the loan. “I’m out making hay. Please leave me a message.” I kid you not. Now it’s hunting season and everyone’s obsessed about that around here—Kurt’s helper didn’t come to work again today because he’s out hunting and the company we sub for said it’s slow, they don’t have any work, it’s hunting season—so maybe that’s the hold-up.

Whatever the reason, we feel like little kids waiting for Christmas. Waiting, waiting, waiting. And then it gets canceled. But they reschedule it! Then we get our hopes up again. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Gotcha! Canceled. But rescheduled. Ah, why don’t they just give us our coal and get it over with?

Friday Night in the Country

It’s Friday night in the country and Kurt and I are back at our computers. We tried to go out. The kid is on a sleepover. Very rare. But there’s nothing to do around here. There aren’t even any lights on in the houses and I wasn’t sure when we passed them if they were abandoned or the people were all asleep. It was only 8:30. Probably half and half. It’s common around here for people to let old farmhouses fall into disrepair and then put a doublewide, or if they have money, build a brick ranch house, a few hundred feet over. It’s also common around here for people to get up when it’s still dark to feed the critters, and so naturally they go to bed early. So it could be either way.

I love the old farmhouses. It breaks my heart when I see brown clapboards with all the paint worn off, buckling porches choked with kudzu and roofs like swayback horses on old farmhouses. Maybe the next time I drive by the roof will have collapsed. It frustrates me that people have given up on these houses. Don’t they know there are people like me who would love them?! How did they get so far behind that giving up and starting fresh made more sense than trying to fix the thing? Maybe one year the heater conked out and the roof started leaking and they thought they could get through one more winter—maybe the livestock market would be better next year. Then the chimney started crumbling and noises on the metal roof as mortar fell and skidded to the gutters raised the hair on the back of the farm wife’s neck. She stopped stirring. She cocked an ear to listen. They couldn’t stay warm. They couldn’t use the bathroom sink because the pipe was broke. (If there was a bathroom sink.) They couldn’t keep up with the paint. They were tired of it. Every spring, scraping, sanding, painting. An old house will kill you.

But still! I would never abandon an old house!

We passed these old houses and the doublewides and neat brick ranch houses, all dark, not long after supper in search of a dive bar we got a tip on. Kelly’s boyfriend, fifteen-years-old, mentioned it in passing. He was over for dinner and was explaining where he lived. I was trying to maintain a look on my face that conveyed both sophistication and friendliness (he comes from a good family—the father is a lawyer). He said, “It’s past this bar. It’s a dump. You wouldn’t want to go there. Rednecks go there.” Kurt’s and my ears perked up. He’s obviously much classier than we are. There was actually a bar around here? And it had rednecks?

All these years we’ve been living here, we haven’t found one good watering hole. Not that we’re big drinkers. But you’d think that in the moonshine capital of the world, in a place where people know how to line dance and play fiddles, we would be able partake in the whole authentic experience in some backwoods honky tonk with knotty pine walls and red-and-white checked floors like you see on TV. Something like Urban Cowboy. But there are none—no honky tonks, saloons, taverns, pubs, inns, or local hangouts of any kind where you can get a beer, a line on some decent moonshine—just so you could say you’ve had it because I hear it’ll rot your insides out if you drink it on a regular basis—and maybe listen to a little bluegrass on a Friday night. At least on this side of the lake. No bars at all. There are forty-seven churches and one Dairy Queen but no bars.

There are a couple of bars on the other side of the lake. They cater to “them ones not from around these parts”—non-locals—who buy McMansions on the water and build docks with boat houses bigger than my real house, but that’s about forty-five minutes around. Plus, they are really not bars, per se. They are really restaurants with bars on the side to accommodate diners waiting for their tables and they seem to go out of their way to shed themselves of any kind of country flavor, which is what we have all come down here for but I suspect the locals are embarrassed by and don’t realize how much we, their only customers, love that stuff. If they did, they’d be making a ton of money. The places would be packed. But, in a misguided attempt to attract us, their décor is designed to be progressive and modern—industrial pipes and duct work exposed on the ceiling (these “pipes” are sometimes fake—cardboard tubes spray-painted with silver paint), plum-colored walls, shiny black tiles, brick, martini glasses with Z-shaped stems.

There is one real bar on the water but it thinks it’s in the Keys and has bamboo tables, blue drinks and plastic palm trees.
It specializes in ‘80s bands and closes at eleven o’clock—about the time I’m just perking up—even on July 4th. Very similar to the Palace across the boardwalk in Keansburg except you could barely get the people out the door at last call at two a.m. and when they had ‘80s bands, it was 1980.

Therefore Kurt and I were really itching to find a cool, authentic place. They might say around here that we had a hankering for one. This might be our only chance since we’re selling the house. Pretty soon we’ll be in New Jersey where we’ll have plenty of bars to choose from but maybe no authentic redneck place. So we decided to go find this dive bar. We couldn’t ask the boyfriend for directions because it’s bad enough that we don’t pray at dinner and we’re already wrecking Kelly’s reputation (the boy, good natured, said that’s okay, when Kelly apologized that we dug right in like two barbarians—he had said a silent prayer). Obviously a nice boy. Last thing we wanted to do was damage her reputation any further—I’d already embarrassed her when I told him that the woman in the old picture he was looking at on the wall in the kitchen was Aunt Millie and she was a hot number. Why I had to describe her, I don’t know. But that’s what we always say about Aunt Millie when her name comes up. She was a hot number. When he looked at me quizzically, I said, “You know, a floozy. Died of cirrhosis of the liver, something like that. Big drinker. But ooh, she was a hot number in her day. Had a couple of husbands, flaming red hair…” So I couldn’t ask him for precise directions and we had to wing it.

Luckily we have the Big Mama because at least if you’re going to drive all over the hillside with nothing to look at but dark houses and hulking shadows that may be cows or children of the corn, at least you can drive in style. I splurged and put my seat warmer on. This was our night on the town! Kidless, in my cowboy boots (not the riding ones, the dancing ones), and going to a backwoods, country dive bar! I imagined some Outlaws on the jukebox, perhaps a little ZZTop—“Waiting for the Bus,” would be perfect—and some oldies, got to have the oldies—“Make the World Go Away,” George Jones, George Strait, Hank. We’d dance across the dusty floor and shoot pool with boys (that’s what they’re called around here—boys—not guys, not men, even if they are grandfathers) in flannel shirts and John Deere caps, and maybe a cowboy or two. There’d be a couple of bleached blondes with too much make-up on and hairdos back from when I was still watching Three’s Company, and a guy named Eeavard with his head on the bar. I mean, how good is that? A guy named Eeavard?!

It wouldn’t have been so bad if I could have gotten a look at some of the farmhouses. But all I could see were shadows zooming by. We couldn’t find the bar. We went further. We turned left. We turned right. We said let’s go a few more miles. We considered calling the boyfriend but ruled it out. How desperate were we anyway? What about if we took Business 29? Maybe it was the business highway and not the regular highway? (I don’t know why they do that—it’s so confusing—two highways with the same name.) We’d get excited every time there was light on the horizon—Look! That’s got to be it! But all it ever was were the yellow lights coming from a church basement or the digital sign from out front. No bars anywhere.

So we’re back on our computers on a Friday night. Which I guess is just as well. I hear boys with names like Eeavard can get pretty rowdy.

Oz

The rainbow

We didn’t close. You heard that right. Slow Bob got the new job. He started it the other day. But then his bank wanted a letter from the old job saying that they would rehire him if necessary. I know! It’s crazy! It’s unheard of! First they make him quit his job and get a new one and then they demand the old one promise to hire him back if the new one doesn’t like the way his breath smells. Slow Bob has requested a letter to this effect, but so far, the old job hasn’t coughed it up.

I’ve come to the conclusion that this is not Virginia, but I am dead and this is some alternate Virginia, the Virginia Hell, and I will spend eternity selling this house over and over again but no one will be able to get a mortgage for it. I’ll get this close and then boom! The deal will fall through!

I am being punished for leaving New Jersey in the first place. I feel guilty for leaving my daughter Jamie when she was in college and we went to Oklahoma to begin with. I feel guilty when my mother was sick and she cried for me to come back, I said I couldn’t. I should have at least lied! Everyone always knocks New Jersey, including the ones who live there. I thought it was going to be so great here. I’ve learned there are good things and bad things about every place. But there is no place like home.
Flying monkeys

I need my ruby slippers! Or a bank that really wants to make a loan!

A Message

It is one week before closing and Slow Bob hasn’t gotten the mortgage commitment yet. Now it turns out he needs a letter of reference from a prior job before the new job will commit to hiring him and he won’t get the mortgage until the new job commits to hiring him. Which I thought was already done, since we were told he got the transfer and were even told the start date, but turns out is not completely done, like how a cake is not done when you stick a toothpick in and it comes out gooey. It’s almost done. It smells good. But you can’t eat it yet. And, in fact, it might burn. Like say if someone is honking outside and when you go to the door, they yell, “Do you have horses?!”

Also, the title work has not been started yet and though there won’t be any problems because my title is clean, it won’t be finished until Wednesday. Monday’s a holiday. Columbus Day or something. Everybody’s out of work; everyone’s clamoring for work; but people will conjure up any excuse they can to not actually go to work. Like last week the helper couldn’t work because it was opening day of hunting season. Hunting season! Here we’ve been scrambling for work and we don’t know where the next job is coming from (and this is one reason we want to go back to New Jersey—it’s not just because I’m homesick—we think we’ll have a better chance finding work up there, not unlike the husbands did during the Depression when they all went up north to work and sent money home to the wives who rented out rooms and sold eggs while waiting for them—I saw that in a movie one time) and the helper takes off for the opening day of hunting season!

So the lawyers informed me not to expect anything on Monday because it’s Columbus Day. Why didn’t they start the title work sooner? They had the order from Slow Bob’s bank since last week. I know because I called them to find out how things were progressing. I started my title work on the house up north last week and that house is supposed to close after this one. Nothing gets done until I get on the phone and ask if they did the thing yet. What am I going to have to do—wipe everyone’s rear ends next?!

Best case scenario, maybe the title work will be finished Tuesday afternoon, but most likely Wednesday. That really means Thursday. Therefore, what it boils down to is this: I’m not going to know if this deal is really going to happen until Thursday. And we’re supposed to close on Friday!

In the meantime, I couldn’t postpone any longer doing things I’d rather do if I was sure we were closing—things that cost me money and money I won’t get back if this deal doesn’t go through, things that disrupt business and will hurt my business if it turns out we are staying, things that hold people up, lead people on, or could be unavailable to me if I wait till the last minute. Like the horse hauler. If I don’t schedule him now, he might not be able to do it on the day that I need him. It’s a two day job and the guy’s got to stay in Virginia overnight. And the flatbed trailer. If we don’t buy one now, we might not find one at the price we can afford when we’re ready to go and we need one to transport the tractor. And the well, septic, and termite inspection on the house down here. If I wait too long, the results won’t come back in time. But if we do it too soon and Slow Bob doesn’t get the mortgage, we still have to pay for tests we didn’t need and are unable to use for the next buyer because the results are only good for thirty days. The termite inspection and the title work up north too. I had to get that going. I had to order boxes, bubble wrap, a moving truck, homeowner’s insurance, electrical service… I had to talk to the schools. We couldn’t wait any longer. In one week we’re supposed to be ready to hitch up the wagons, literally, on Bob’s bank’s word that everything looks good. What if they’ve got their hands behind their backs and their fingers are crossed?!

I’m freaking out. Today is my mother’s birthday and I was hoping I’d get a message from her. Some words of wisdom. Something to calm me down. I listened for her words when I was picking up manure, but nothing. I was hoping I’d see a butterfly but I didn’t. My only consolation is knowing that I will finally know the answer, one way or another, in one week. If they don’t show up in the lawyer’s office on Friday, then I think it’s safe to assume it’s not going to happen. And if they do… well, I can’t even imagine the relief I’ll feel.

Then I got a text. It was from my daughter Jamie who lives in North Carolina (temporarily) and who I visited yesterday to bring some stuff that wouldn’t fit in my new house but Jamie could use. Plus all her boxes that I’ve been carting around for the last ten years—toys, cards, books with flowers pressed between the pages, old clothes, even a set of rubber car mats with red and black zebra stripes. When she was going through her stuff, she came across this:
I don’t know how it got in there! The date on the back says “1996.” And what were the chances of Jamie finding it today? Tell me that’s not a direct message from my mother! I couldn’t have gotten a better message unless she hand-delivered it herself.

I'll Believe It When I See It

Slow Bob got the transfer! But that don’t mean anything. (I’d like to stop right here and tell you that I know my English is not always correct—I should have said, “That doesn’t mean anything,”—but I am writing how I speak, just like I would if we were sitting across the table from each other having a cup of coffee. Not to say I always know what’s correct English. However sometimes I know when it’s not right and I do it anyway.)

So Bob got the transfer. We got more hay yesterday anyway.
Even though everything looks pretty good at this point, I have no faith that it will actually happen. According to Bob’s banker, the only thing we’re waiting for now is the appraisal. Since we keep lowering the price every time we lose a buyer and put it back on the market, the last appraisal is twenty thousand dollars higher than what Bob is paying. And since we never stop working on it (since the last appraisal, we’ve painted ceilings, put pea gravel in the tractor shed, installed a new ceiling light, put ferns on the porch…) the amount of the appraisal shouldn’t be a problem.

The loan officer said, “Just as long as there are good comps, we should be good to go!”

I assured her, “Oh yeah, there are plenty of good comps!”

But there aren’t. I live in a town of about a thousand people. We’re out in the middle of nowhere. And this is a place people don’t move away from. People stay here. What are the chances that, at any given time, there will be a farm exactly like mine for sale?—a four bedroom house with one bathroom and with real horse facilities including a riding arena on ten acres? There’s a house for sale down the block right now. It has two acres, three bathrooms, no horse facilities and it’s on the highway. There’s another one in the other direction that has around the same acres as mine and a similar horse barn. But no house. (Of course serious horse people don’t care about houses. Just give us a barn with water and electric and a place to plug in the coffee pot so we can make a bran mash for the old guy in the winter.) A couple of miles down the road there’s an old dairy farm on sixty acres for sale. None of them are really comparable to mine. What are they going to want? A cookie-cutter house in the middle of a development that’s the same as all the other ones except the kitchen is beige and not blue?

So it’s going to depend on how much of a stickler Bob’s bank is going to be. And that means I had to go and get more hay.

Getting Ready For Winter

We had to get hay. There was no getting around it. We could be here for a while. Our latest buyer, let’s call him Bob, got turned down for a mortgage because the bank thinks his commute to work is too long. You’ve got that right. The bank is suddenly concerned about a borrower’s quality of life and butts into decision-making like a meddling mother-in-law who gives the baby a pacifier, or takes it away—whatever she deems is right—because the mother of the baby is obviously an idiot.

I warned Bob about the trouble the banks were giving people who tried to get a mortgage to buy this place. Bob told me if he got the house he planned to transfer to one of his company’s branches closer to home after he got settled in. But in the meantime he would commute. Admittedly, it wasn’t close. Almost two hours. Just like what my girlfriend’s husband does who owns a car dealership up in New Jersey and less than what my other girlfriend’s husband does who works in Manhattan. Sometimes you have to travel for good things.

I advised him not to mention his plans to the bank. If he transferred, they’d claim he got a new job and they don’t give mortgages to people with new jobs. I said don’t give them any ammunition. Don’t even mention it. Don’t tell them that I have a really nice riding arena and you could give riding lessons if you wanted to even though you don’t plan to. Don’t even say it. (They rejected my first buyer because of that. Didn’t want her to rely on paying her mortgage by giving riding lessons even though she was a registered nurse and in fact took riding lessons on her days off.) I warned him: don’t say anything.

But who knew they’d have a problem with the commute? It didn’t even occur to me and I don’t know if it occurred to Bob because he was fine with it. Why should it bother anyone else? I have no idea how the bank found out. Are they Mapquesting the distance people go to work in addition to pulling credit reports and looking at tax returns? What’s next? Will they ask for proof that you own a riding lawnmower because push mowers require too much energy? Will they ask for references from people who will vouch that you know your way around a toolbox and can fix a broken window and repair the heater if it conks out? That actually makes sense. You would think maintaining their investment would be more of a concern to them than worrying about how far the borrower has to drive.

Bob hasn’t given up. He’s trying to get the transfer. But I don’t have a lot of confidence. Last year we thought we were closing, so we didn’t cut wood. I’m too cheap to use the electric heat continuously so I got ripped off buying a dump truck full of wood that turned out to be so green it sizzled and spit like driftwood just washed up on the beach and had to be resplit because the pieces were so big and heavy I could only carry one at a time. And you know how strong I am. I don’t want that to happen again even though getting hay is the worst job in the world. I’d rather clean sheaths. I’d rather weed-whack all the monkey weed or the pig weed, whatever that crap is that grows on the bank behind the arena like it’s on steroids. Forget manure. Even though most people would lump manure in with the sheaths and the weed-whacking, I like picking it up because that’s when I do all my thinking. That’s when my mother talks to me.

At any rate, we had to go and get the hay because I have no faith Bob is going to get the transfer and I think we’re going to be stuck here for the winter, possibly forever. Kurt was kicking and screaming. He’s sick of this farm stuff. It doesn’t help that he hasn’t ridden the horses since we moved out of Jersey eight years ago. And that was the whole point. The horses. But all he’s been doing is building barns and building fences and fixing houses and then fixing houses more so we could sell the houses. We thought we were going to kick back in the country. Have a nice, slower-paced life. Sit on the porch with a glass of iced tea and a slice of blackberry pie; maybe mosey down to the barn for a ride once in a while. But he spends more time and energy maintaining things, fixing things and trying to get rid of the things that we fixed than actually partaking in the rocking chairs on the front porch or the triple gates we installed on the riding arena so we could enter and exit on three sides or the manicured trails he keeps in tip-top condition because you never know when someone’s going to want to come and look at the house. He doesn’t even have a horse anymore since Kelly took over Bullet. So he was not happy about the hay.

The thing about hay is you have to get it while it’s available. It’s not like Jersey where you can pick up the phone once a month and say you want some and the hay guy delivers and stacks it on Thursday. Here, you’ve got to go get it yourself. And you’ve got to get it while the going’s good. Because the farmer won’t store it for you. Even if he had a place to store it, he’s not doing it. You want it, you come and get it right now before Wesley Bell comes and gets it because Wesley just picked up a couple of nice Walkers down at the sale and they need some groceries right quick. Hay, in the land of hay, is somehow a commodity that’s in short supply. At least if you want hay without mold or Johnson grass or crushed up cans and Styrofoam cups baled up with it. And it’s almost impossible to get delivered.

We got 95 bales at the crack of dawn on Sunday morning after going out for Kurt’s birthday the night before. We tried to schedule it for later so Kurt could sleep a little on his only day off. I claimed the horses were on a strict schedule regarding their meals and we would come over after they ate their breakfast but the hay lady was having none of it. She had something else to do and wasn’t waiting around for us to buy her hay. She’s one of the few around here who doesn’t go to church so I don’t know what else she had going on that was more important than getting three hundred dollars in a place where people work half a week to bring home that kind of money and where by the looks of her house—blue tarp on the roof, plywood on a window—she could use.

We’re going to need another four hundred to get through the winter. Three hundred if you go by Kurt. Five hundred if you go by me. And we’re going to have to go back before Wesley Bell gets them. I don’t even want to think about the wood.