growing dreams, part one

Or, How I Came to Realize Real Estate Was the Only Place to Ever Put Money

Or, How Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned by Reading Gone With the Wind.

Cue sweeping soundtrack and sunset backdrop

Gerald: Do you mean to tell me, Katie Scarlett O'Hara, that Tara - that land doesn't mean anything to you? Why, land's the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts.

Scarlett: Oh, Pa. You talk like an Irishman.

Gerald: It's proud I am that I'm Irish, and don't you be forgetting, Missy, that you're half-Irish, too. And, to anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them - why, the land they live on is like their mother. Oh, but there, there. Now, you're just a child. It'll come to you, this love of the land. There's no getting away from it if you're Irish.

Well, Gerald, I?m a quarter Irish, but I seriously doubt the people of Ireland have a corner on the market of loving land. But, you know, I can see how you could think that way seeing as the Irish can get all insular like that, kind of like the Greeks.*

So, back in the early ?90s when I lived in The House That Made Me Weep, I believed that my husband, though utterly irresistible in so many respects, had done a bad, bad thing. In fact, I believe at the time I may have made one or two references concerning the purchase of said fixer-upper as being the ?stupidest decision ever made in the history of human kind.? Okay. I?m all about the truth, so?it might?ve been closer to 2 or 3 hundred times that I lamented his poor real estate decision making skills. Loudly. In public (whenever possible). Yes I, like a young Scarlett O?Hara, was supremely deficient in the kind of grounded wisdom that understands the value of purchasing property.

In my defense, I would say that at this exact time, an ENORMOUS bubble had burst that had been swelling up through the 1980s and everyone got slammed in the early 90s with overvalued property and ridiculous mortgages (including us) and the newspapers were filled daily with foreclosures. It felt very much like a recession in these parts (wait, maybe there was a recession going on?) And there I was financially trapped in a house I loathed that needed years and years and years of renovation and me??spackling, painting, rewiring, plastering, banging nails, sanding and?yeah, not so much.

Then, one day, as I stood in the kitchen gazing out the window at a hideously overgrown forsythia that was the only plant in the scrabby sandpit we called a front yard, I got fed up with the ugly, seven-foot tall weeds that were shooting out from the center of the big bush. I put down my coffee, went into the barn, found some kind of hacking implement?might?ve been an axe, could?ve been a hatchet, god only knows?and headed into the belly of the beast.

I hacked and whacked and when I was done there wasn?t so much as a tendril of weed left to sway in the wind. Instead there was a pile of the stinkiest, bamboo-like stalks that filled the wheelbarrow four times and then some.

The next morning as I drank my coffee and gazed out on my handiwork, I saw that where once had been an eyesore of overgrowth was now two distinct bushes that complemented each other: a forsythia and a spirea. Both were quite old and established. I decided to go out and prune them. Which I did. Which led me to making a peony bed beside them. Which led me to transplanting the lilies that were choked underneath the two bushes. Which, . . . you guessed it, led me to creating a garden. Something I had never, ever done before but which tied me into the land emotionally (land! Remember we?re talking about an abandoned lot here).

Meanwhile, as the garden grew and prospered, T was wreaking some serious home improvement on The House That Made Me Weep.**

We now had a bedroom and a kitchen and a bathroom that were, quite nice. And we?d taken down walls which opened up the warren into more of a home. And, we got rid of the trolls upstairs (hear the angels sing!) and took over the whole house.

And then we woke up one day and ten years had gone by. The town we lived in was prospering. The real estate market was on the rise and we had something called SWEAT EQUITY. Sweet. Suddenly, my husband?s terrible decision making was, er, sort of, um, genius. (Not to mention he is the sweat in our sweat equity--- I was just the space between the two words?you know, holding them together).

And?NONE OF THIS is what I sat down to tell you?Grrrrr. Piss. Not what I sat down to tell you. Am lost. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow?I will get us back on track and you will see that the aging process has not affected my brain or my ability to think clearly and logically and proceed with a modicum of intelligence from point A to point B.

Tomorrow?you will see. Er, I think.

*You want stereotype? I?ll give you stereotype.

** We also had a fire burn out the entire first floor where we were living so that kind of kick-started the home improvement process a bit. But that?s a story for a different day.

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