A postcard arrived in the mail. One of those gimmicky ones made to look like real handwriting. It said, “I’m interested in buying your house …”
My wife always takes great offense to things like this. We get them every once in a while. Part anger, part sarcasm and part joking, she said she wanted to contact this person and tell them we would be happy to sell … for a price that was three times what the place is worth.
“Actually, could you imagine that?” she said. “We could buy a huge lot somewhere and build whatever we wanted.”
“Yeah,” I said longingly, picturing never having to nail down a loose porch floorboard or fixing another termite-eaten piece of siding on the century-old downtown house. “I can imagine it!”
My daughter wasn’t so amused. “We’re not selling the house,” she declared at dinner. “Not for any amount.”
“Nothing?” my wife asked.
“World peace,” she replied, which I thought was an incredibly thoughtful and inspiring thing for a 10-year-old. (Even if it did just mean, “infinity!”)
The kid must like the house.
I do, too. And most days I can’t figure out why. While the back is a relatively new addition with the creature comforts of modern construction, the front is still the same cottage that was already having issues when the Spanish Conquistadors pulled in to St. Augustine to take in a movie at the IMAX.
I was working in the front yard the other day and a couple walking by stopped to tell me how much they’ve always loved my house. “Yeah?” I said, scratching my head and wondering what they saw in it. Did it conjure up some kind of mirage or optical illusion?
It’s a great house, but it comes with its share of issues. The walls have all the insulating properties of a handkerchief. The windows stick when you try to open them, and they fall like guillotine blades if you pry them free. The kitchen might be shearing off like a tectonic plate — that’s my theory for a small crack running along some moulding — and the floors creak and give so much that you get sea-sick walking across them.
As old houses are known to do, mine has come in for a patch of minor repairs and little fixes that always come in swarms. A kitchen faucet went bad. Touchups were needed to the front porch. Some wood over there is rotting. I’m expecting any day to discover a family of badgers living in the attic.
So what is it about old houses that we love so much? The look? The quaintness? The connection to a long-gone time? Tetanus?
And yet, there’s no place I would rather be. We’ve owned it since 1997, and put more blood, sweat and tears into it than I thought my body had to bear. So no thanks on the offer, computer-generated postcard. We’ll take the sea-sickness on the floors and the windows that come crashing down. At least until world peace is on the table.