Here is a weird thing about owning a house: owning trees. If the lot on which the house you own has trees, you are the de facto owner of the trees. I have owned three houses now (not simultaneously) & all three have had trees. I was the owner of trees. Still am, I guess, since I still own a house in Lexington which is currently on the market.
Not only was am I an owner of trees, I watched a tree die. In Austin, one of our trees died. It died. Trees have lifespans. A tree I owned died. In Lexington, a tree we owned was too close to the house, its roots possibly damaging the house's foundation, so we killed it. Well, we didn't kill it. We hired someone to do it. Someone killed our tree for us.
Isn't that strange? A human being can own a tree. A human being can watch a tree he or she owns die helplessly. A human being can murder a tree he or she owns. Isn't that sad & weird & strange?
We're looking for a house to buy in Fort Worth now, & here's a weird thing about looking for a house: you get to go into houses where people still live & look around.
For example, a house we looked at yesterday had literature by the bedside from Al-Anon. Here's what that organization does. That seemed an awfully personal thing to discover about a stranger. Not only that, but my wife, myself, & our realtor stayed in the house, where they had something cooking in a crock pot, for almost an hour talking about the house, sometimes saying unflattering things. Imagine! People coming into your home, noticing extremely intimate things from which they might draw any number of conclusions, & then being critical about it while still in your home.
That seems like a very strange way to do things.
Today we went to a house (which my wife liked very much) & asked the realtor about the previous owners, who we knew had recently died. She quickly said to us, "They didn't die in the house!"
Neither my wife nor I are superstitious, & of course everyone has to die at some point, but it seemed something of an indignity that a deceased person must suffer (even though, of course, they can't be offended, since they're dead) if they had the bad fortune to not only die, but to die in their own home.
& if they did, the realtor's probably going to lie about anyway.
Not only that, but if the person died & there's stuff in the house, whoever's responsible for the estate - their children, or grandchildren, or bankers, or whoever - they've got to either sell or throw away that stuff. So you're looking at all the stuff from a person's life that they quite literally couldn't take with them.
Oh, listen, I understand, there's often circumstances that make it impossible to empty a house before it's put on the market - & it's equally weird to go into those houses that are "staged" with cheap furniture & the inevitable tables with glass fruit on them - but even if the owners are still alive, I feel like I'm going into a house after a murder. I should be carrying scientific equipment with me.
These are weird things about looking to buy a house. I always feel so ill-prepared for this adulthood I entered decades ago; but even if they had taught this in school, I would've thought they were blowing it out of proportion. Like gerunds. A whole section on gerunds? Really?
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