4:31 p.m. - 2002-05-15
A New House Love Affair
Last night Bruce and I went to Wal-Mart (yes, Wal-Mart, you snotty people! It's the only place in Huntsville that sells Iron Green, which my roses are begging for!) and by the time we finished going through the 25 person line at the checkout it was dark. Dark, except for the eerie moon.
Did y'all see the moon last night? It was a crescent, but the rest of the moon could be seen in a faint outline, and next to it, shining really brightly, was Venus. I had read that the planets were doing strange things lately, but wasn't quite expecting to encounter the effects in the parking lot at Wal-Mart. We had to stop and stare.
As we were staring an elderly black man came up to us. "That's a scary moon, ain't it?" he asked. "It talks about that kinda moon in Revelations! You go home, you read it!" He shook his head and wandered off, obviously shaken.
Well, there may be a bad moon on the rise, but this morning I awoke feeling clearer than I have felt for months. It appears that the owner of the Hickory Hill house is not going to lower her price anytime soon so despite my aching love affair with her house my life must go on. Sniff.
To pass the time and amuse ourselves, we've started looking at other houses. Wierdly, the house we looked at today is being listed by our buyer's agent. He never mentioned it to us because it's reasonably close to the railroad tracks and interstate and it's in hideous condition. But when I saw it I instantly fell in love with it!
It's an 1880's house, painted bright, freaking blue. Obviously the house has seen many wierd and bad updates. It also has, shall we say, deferred maintenance, ie: there are birds nesting in the broken clapboards. However...peeking through the windows we could see that it has hardwood floors, a beautiful front staircase, the original, unpainted beadboard ceilings. The front door is carved to match the little attic windows, which have no windows in them.
"It must be bat central up there!" exclaimed Bruce. "You'd be right at home!"
And as if on cue, I looked up at the porch roof at that point to see a little bat squeezed into a crack. We scrutinized it for a few minutes, trying to figure out if it was alive.
In the end, Bruce gently poked it with a stick. It was dead. Very, very dead.
This actually made me quite excited. Some of you, who have known me for a looooong time, may remember that when I moved into 20 Ashford Street I found a dead bat outside of the Linden Superette. This was the inspiration for changing my name to Fledermaus, and it was the start of a very nice period of my life. So I actually don't think finding a dead bat is such a bad thing. It doesn't necessarily mean we should buy this particular house, but it could be a hopeful sign that the rest of my life is going to improve.
One can always hope, eh??
For all of you who enjoy the "stats", this house is 2000 square feet and the asking price is.....(drumroll) $39,000. That's right. Thirty nine thousand. David says it needs about $30,000 worth of work. So that's about $70,000. Tempting!!
I'm still very in love with Hickory Hill, but just 'cause I'm attached it doesn't mean I can't flirt, right?
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