Category: The Estate

Wherein I share about my 747-square-foot manse and its grounds.

Dear Neighbors

Where I’m from, on that winding stretch of Old Highway 421 between Boone and Mountain City, we lift a finger. Or rather, lift a fanger.

I don’t mean we help other people, thought we do that too. I’m referring to the gesture we make in our car as another car passes in the opposite direction. We lift a fanger. That is, we pick one or two fingers up off the steering wheel in a modified wave, to greet the other driver.

Old habits die hard. I would lift a fanger at the folks traveling down my country road when I lived in Hillsborough. Often, they would wave back.

Now I live in your neighborhood in downtown Durham, and as I walk the dogs, my impulse is still to wave. But it’s hard. Wrangling 140 pounds of pit bull, and simultaneously acknowledging my neighbors’ existence is hard.

I say all this because I want you to know that if it looks like I’m hoisting a bag of dog poop and slinging it in your direction, that’s just my attempt to be friendly. Sorry if there’s been any confusion.

Your neighbor,

Amy

Is It My Perfume?

OK, I’m in. I closed on my 747-square-foot manse on Friday afternoon. Signed, sealed, delivered, it’s mine.

I was walking the dogs around my new neighborhood in the afternoon rain on Saturday, and guess what I found. A stray dog. He was a big, black, Shepherd/Scaredy-dog mix, skinny, faded collar but no tags, not fixed. He and Redford got along swimmingly. (See what I did there, with the rain and the swimmingly.) The stray followed us a couple blocks back to our house and into the back yard. He took a biscuit but only at ten paces from me.

I called Animal Control, but of course, they were closed for the weekend. The message said for animal emergencies to call 911. I figured that my temptation to adopt yet another dog was an emergency. If I kept him until Monday when the office opened again, I wasn’t gonna call. I was going to have three dogs. In my might-as-well-be-a-mobile-home. The four of us would have had 186.75 square feet each.

When the animal control officer came, the poor monkey kept circling the shed and darting away from her. At one point, he ran up onto the deck and poised himself to jump over the railing! I managed to grab his collar, and the officer got that loop-on-a-pole around his neck and rassled him into the truck.

I wanted to call out, “Wait! No! Forget it, I’ll take him,” but I bit my tongue. The officer called me about 20 minutes later—between you and me, I think she might have had a little crush on me—and told me he was fine and calm once he got to the shelter.

Man, I hope he finds a home. Him and my gentle beast from a couple weeks ago. (I haven’t had the balls to call the shelter and check on that little guy.)

I’m not a praying person, but if I were, I’d be on my knees tonight.

Mama Said There’d Be Days Like These

Yesterday at 3:00pm I learned that I would not be closing on my new house at 4:00pm. My buyer’s bank had screwed the pooch on her paperwork, thus she had not yet bought my old house, therefore I did not have the 10% that I needed to put down on my new place.

Fantastic.

This, after I agreed to pay twenty-eight hundred bucks for her closing costs. This, after I replaced the water heater and the sub floor that the leak had rotted through for over a grand. Then the $985 termite treatment and the mold guy who came and said, “Well, I don’t see any mold, but I’ll spray the stuff they probably think is mold.” For $125. And after that, when I, like an asshole, put a kitchen chair cushion in my washing machine, and it shredded it to bits and blocked up the pump. That’ll be 80 bucks for a service call, thanks.

This, after packing up all my shit over the past month and renting a truck and getting my crew to schlep it out on a 100-degree day last weekend. This, after living out of a suitcase at my lovely friend Erika’s house for four days.

They think they’ve got her loan package redone, and they think we can close tomorrow.

They better think that shit into existence because I don’t know how much more I can take.

And as if I wasn’t stressed enough…Erika and her girlfriend left for the beach this afternoon, and when I came home, I accidentally set off their house alarm. Christ Almighty, it was like I was peeing on an electric fence while someone smashed wine bottles in my ear canals. Like, it actually physically hurt.

I called Erika in a panic and somehow finally got it shut off. Right then, E’s friend came to the front door with her dog. My dogs were going buck-wild so I stepped onto the stoop. And the door shut, thipp. Locked. My key—the spare key—was inside. My phone was inside. My wallet was inside. Most disturbingly, my dogs were inside…with all of Erika’s lovely things. Things they could shred in a hot second.

I fucking lost it. I sat on the steps and sobbed into my hands.

One of E’s neighbors was lovely enough to look up a locksmith’s number and let me use her phone. The dude said he’d be twenty minutes. I called my sister and asked if she’d come sit with me to wait, and she left her 8-year-old and her 5-year-old and her 9-month-old at 9:00 on a weeknight to come listen to me boo-hoo and rub my back and say Shhhh.

The lock man arrived. Sixty bucks and three minutes later—two of which I think he was just pantomiming so it didn’t look like he was getting paid sixty dollars a minute—I was back inside. And the only thing Redford had eaten was my sneaker.

Well, hell, what’s another fifty bucks on new Nikes?

No Wonder My House Was Filthy All the Time

A week ago, I flopped on the sofa, feeling melancholy about leaving the house. My house, my first house. The bead board, the crown molding, the 18-inch square tiles in the kitchen. The screened porch, the porch swing. The yard, my Amish-built shed, the fence, the butterfly bush, Boonie.

The heat recently—my god, the heat: unrelenting, punishing, angry. The air conditioning slowly evaporated beads of sweat off my upper lip. The sun slanted through the panes of the west-facing window in the living room. Violet lay frog-dog on the hard wood. Redford stood in front of the couch, jovially commanding affection. I patted his butt. The beam of late-afternoon sunlight suddenly became swirlingly opaque.

And I thought, “That’s a lot of dirt coming off my dog.”

Digs

I’ll write about my trip in a minute, but I was just at the grocery store and figured out that two twelve-packs of canned dog food would take me to the end of my time in this house.

Wah. I love my house.

I mean, come ON. How cute is that?

But I’m trying to think positively about my new place. Here’s what’s great about it:

  • 5.6 miles from my sister
  • 2 miles from my new job
  • Very close to many friends, including 4 blocks(!) from Sam
  • Less than one mile from the dog park
  • Two bedrooms and one-and-a-half bathrooms
  • Built in 1949, but completely rehabbed—new refrigerator, stove, deck, fence
  • IT HAS A DISHWASHER. A BRAND NEW DISHWASHER.
  • It’s in Durham, where I need to be, want to be; it will allow me to be spontaneously social.

The “eh” parts:

  • It’s six blocks from a pawn shop.
  • It’s about 100 square feet smaller than my one-bedroom-one-bath.
  • On a good day, you might call it a “bungalow-style” house; on a bad day, you might say it looked like a “double-wide” that had been “turned perpendicular to the street”.

I’m going to invest in some flowering shrubbery.