Value-Added
Just a little bit of gossip. I know Embot may be interested. A house in which we used to live is coming on the market....for $3.4 million. (Hint, Em - it ain’t the house on Hilbert in Cedarburg!) A friend who just happens to be in real estate (kindly bear in mind that I’m writing from a town in which every other woman is in real estate) approached me while I was in line for confession yesterday morning. She happens to be the listing agent and thought I’d be interested. Tuesday is the ‘broker’s open house’ but she thought I might want to walk through just to see what marvelous things the new owners have done. (Marvelous things indeed if they have quadrupled the cost of the house in less than 5 years.) Oh, well, just one more sin to haul into the confessional. Who do I envy? The agent? The sellers? The potential buyers? Everyone who doesn’t live in a three bedroom town-house?

I may pass on the open house. It would be more than just a walk down memory lane. I might start muttering to myself and anyone else around about how tres tacky/nouveau riche the fountain in the front yard is. There would be the temptation to collar any willing broker and talk to her (chances 9 to 1 being that the broker would be female) about the provenance of this ‘one-of-a-kind’ house on the lake. Let’s see............there was the fact that a real human being, with who knows what potential to be president/Pope/pop star, was born in the first floor guest room. The lower roof that an pre-adeolescent Em climbed out on to protest the fact that she was not given a wine glass for her cranberry juice one Thanksgiving. The spot on the back clapboard where I left a chunk of my face after tripping on garden stake (Mea culpa - I shouldn’t have been running into the house, through the garden, 8 months pregnant) So many memories. So many Merry Christmases, Happy Birthdays. I would pass on th bad stuff......colorful, but I’d keep it under my metaphorical hat. (You know,Em, like the sister that was dropped off on the back porch in a dangerous degree of intoxication. The time the police came to investigate a potential kidnapping when one of your sibs was taken to school screaming. That kind of thing.)