TheBanyanTree: Two Years Ago

[Margaret R. Kramer]

We moved into this house two years ago.  It was April 10, 2006 when I closed
on this house and got rid of our old one.

My old house was a byproduct from my first marriage.  I paid my ex-husband
his half of the equity and it became all mine.  It was gray with cedar
shakes and cute and a split level and it was too big for just two people.
There were rooms we never used, like the useless living room.

It took almost a year to sell it, as it was the beginning of the real estate
meltdown.  We found this old house, built in 1947, with a new remodeled
kitchen and a massive oversized double garage with a second floor.  It’s a
smaller house, but better constructed.  This house uses its space very well,
so it seems quite large.

I like the neighborhood.  On top of the hill, across the street, are large,
mansion-like homes.  But we are the Whos in Whoville and are the little
people.  Our neighborhood is a working class neighborhood.  There are
singles, married with children, married without children, older people, and
young people.  Lots of us own dogs and cats.

There is a small playground and baseball fields down the block from us.  We’
re close to the freeway.  It’s easy to get to either downtown St. Paul or
downtown Minneapolis.

Ray and I loved this house.  It was OUR house, a house we picked out
together, and it wasn’t a residual of a previous marriage.

It was 80 degrees on the day we moved in.  Even though we had movers, all
they did was plop the furniture and boxes in the house, kind of where they
belonged, and it was up to us to get things organized.  I opened all the
windows, but we were dripping sweat by nightfall.

We spent our first night here with no TV, because the cable wasn’t hooked up
yet, and I couldn’t find the antenna for our bedroom TV.  We slept on a
mattress with no sheets, because I couldn’t find the sheets.  I got up at
2:30 am, because I couldn’t sleep, and started to unpack the kitchen boxes
and get the kitchen set up.

While I got the house organized over the course of the next week, Ray built
his workshop in the garage.  We were the divide and conquer couple.

It was great to just settle in and relax after a year of chaos and keeping
the old house clean and staged and being ready to leave for a showing at a
moment’s notice.

Fast forward two years and things have changed.  Ray is not here.  But the
house is.  And I still love it.  It’s probably too big for me, just one
person, but even if I wanted to, in this down market, I couldn’t sell it.
Three houses recently sold on our block, but it took a year for them to
sell.  And, because I have virtually no equity in this house after just two
years, I wouldn’t make any money on it anyway.

There was a lot of Ray in our old house.  When Ray came to live with me,
that old house was falling apart.  My ex couldn’t fix anything and neither
could I.  A symptom of our marriage was poor money management, so we couldn’
t afford to hire people to help us. The first year Ray was with me, we
painted the outside of the house.  The next year, he remodeled the kitchen.
As the years went by, he laid wooden floors in the dining room and living
room.  He ripped up the old carpet and we laid new carpet.  He painted every
room and ceiling.  We landscaped the back yard and Ray built a fabulous
deck.

But the house outgrew us and it was time to move.

I’m hoping to hang onto the new house for at least 10 years.  But it won’t
stay the same house.  It will change.  And because Ray’s time in this house
was so short, there won’t be much of him here.

Ray was slowing down when we moved here.  I know the move took a lot out of
him.  It was stressful to sell the old house and then get everything
together for the new one.  His lungs were in bad shape, so it was difficult
for him to work as much as he used to.

That first year he put his shop together in the garage.  My office is the
smallest room in the house.  It was painted a dark blue with light blue
carpeting.  Ray painted my office a rose color and ripped out the carpeting.
The wooden floor needs to be redone, but we never got in the mood to move
the heavy furniture nor did we have the money.  Ray added some shelves in
the kitchen.  Ray put up a fence around the big garden bed.  He did some
minor repairs.

Last year, he did very little.  He added edging around the smaller garden
beds.  We built a new bed behind the garage.  That was about it.  It was a
hot summer and he spent a lot of time in the air conditioned house, on the
computer, reading email or playing online poker.

I look at his workbench in the garage like a detective digging for clues.
He had a self-propelled lawn mower that didn’t self-propel anymore.  It’s
all taken apart and sits by his workbench.  He was cutting diagonal pieces
of wood for some reason.  I’m not sure if it was for work or home.  I bought
him a stool for Christmas and those pieces are piled on top of the stool
along with a big wrench.

Tools and parts are strewn across his workbench.  He tried to keep
organized, but, well, his work area was his own.

Our house has a shop in the basement, too.  A previous owner had built a
nice workbench along with shelves and cabinets.  I thought Ray might have
taken up residence there when the weather was too cold to work in the
garage, but he never did.  He stored some tools there.  All the paint cans
are lined up on the shelves, but that’s pretty much it.  That space was
never used.

It’s funny how we spend a big chunk of our lives acquiring things and then
as we slide towards old age, we start downsizing.  Ray wanted to have a
garage sale this spring or summer.  I hate doing garage sales, although I
love going to them.  To me, they’re a lot of work and the payout isn’t worth
the time spent organizing it.  It’s easier for me to take the crap to
Goodwill.  But Ray loved to set up a sale.  He did several at our old house.

Well, the sun is out today.  No snow for a change.  It’s going to be chilly,
however.  Quite a change from two years ago.  But a lot of things have
changed.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net
margaret.kramer at polarispublications.com

www.polarispublications.com

There are things that we don't want to happen but have to accept, things we
don't want to know but have to learn, and people we can't live without but
have to let go.
~Unknown
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