Starting to Say Goodbye

We met today with a real estate agent about selling our house up here in British Columbia. We bought it almost 20 years ago, and we have had a wonderful time living here, even if only part time, but even as all good things must come to an end, so must our transiting back and forth between countries. My simplest way of explaining this is getting out while the getting is good, by which I mean while we still can manage to do it with our wits and bodies reasonably unimpaired and with both of us still here to participate. Another way to put it is that maintaining multiple properties is getting to be too much of a chore. But however it is put, it needs to be put, and thus the meeting.

The agent we called is the same guy who was our agent when we bought the house: he was then in his forties and we were in our fifties; now he is in his sixties and we in our seventies. That’s the nature of time and arithmetic, I guess, but we had not seen one another for maybe 16 years, so it was surprising to find (to our eyes) that he was just as he was then; and he kindly offered us the same assessment. And then we got down to business.

You can pretty much tell how the economy is up here by how carefully, how gently he approached us. Clearly, he is used to having to deliver bad news to people. The kind of bad news that is phrased like, “I know you could have sold your house for a zillion dollars last year, but this year, maybe a trillion less, in any case a lot less. It’s a very bad market right now and we just don’t see it getting better for awhile.” We were not, of course, surprised to hear this, but apparently many people are as he brought us a lot of paper to demonstrate how prices were falling in B.C. generally.

Not being able to get an argument from us about how bad things are (he assured us he’d been through four ups and four downs…but then how much longer do we any of us have to see any more of that roller coast ride?), we progressed to introducing him (again) to the house. Walking around in it, explaining all the things we loved about it—both its inherent qualities and things we had changed to make it even more wonderful (at least to us)—I was struck by how much I admired it as a house, how much I had enjoyed living here, how much I still anticipate, each return trip, seeing the great opening to light that one experiences when entering the house…like walking into the sky through a tree. And also how willing I was to let it go. It has always seemed to me a house that owns itself and that I had been lucky enough to travel with for awhile. Time now to find its next traveling partners. Somewhere out there, some terrifically lucky family are eating dinner without a clue as to what an amazing house is right there in their future. This year, next year, I guess we'll meet them.