Skip to main content
So anyway.  Getting back to this log house - and how it came to be in my life. 
I was transferred at work, and the commute was just too far...  this area was middle ground and we had been talking about it for a while.  My ex-husband and I had bought and sold four houses prior to this move.  We had moved a total of eight times during our 22 year marriage.  He liked a house, I liked a house, he chose a house...  it was never a mutual decision.  We were never really on the same page. 
So, we got together with his friend's wife, Jacquie, who was a real estate agent.  She showed us two places prior to this one.  Neither were to our liking - on that we agreed.  One had train tracks - and trains that passed by quite noisily several-times-a-day, plus it was on what seemed to be a fairly busy street.  The next one overlooked a trailer park on one side and had a transfer (garbage) station in the back plus a kitchen that we and our two young boys could not all fit in at one time.  A few days later she told me about this place that was on a little bit of land and showed me the MLS photo: two garage doors.  That was it... 
We pulled up and had to really pick up our feet - the house had been foreclosed several years earlier and noone had lived in it since.  There was at least 18" of snow on the ground - we all plowed our way to the deck where she told us the front door was.  Once I stood on that deck and looked around me, I simply said, "I don't have to go in - this is it"... and, for once, we agreed...we mutually agreed.

I knew this house was a jewel the minute we rolled up.  Despite the freezing cold temperatures and cloudy skies, we trudged possibly one hundred feet down down a hill, through thick, overgrown bushes and eighteen inches of snow all the while trying to stay on a narrow trail to reach the front door.  We took four wobbly steps up onto the uneven deck, and through lifeless, scraggly scrub oak branches we had an unbelievable view of the majestic Front Range... and I knew right then and there that this was where I wanted to be.  "I don't need to go inside" I announced as the real estate agent, Jacquie, put in the code to unlock the lockbox which was hanging askew from the delaminating gold knob on the splintered front door.  I knew it was my Diamond in the Rough... I knew it would be home.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Loving Memory...

I have an "inspiration" binder that I keep on a shelf in my office at home where I’ve collected pictures of things I've found in magazines.  There's a few priceless treasures of artwork that my kids made me tucked in there too.  I only add super special stuff - things that I know I'll love for the long term.   Anyway, we were talking about a project at the house when I suddenly thought of a photo I wanted to share with Russ and brought the binder out.  As I was flipping through these pages of images that I'd saved over a good decade of time,  I found this little quote Mom had sent to me.  I don't know when she sent it, but I had liked it so much.  There it was, this two sentence quote that SHE must have cut out of a magazine.  The words were highlighted in what was now a faded yellow marker and she’d written four little words above it on a hot pink sticky note in her beautiful cursive writing.  A note just for me. Reminding me to believ...

Mem'ries

They really are like the beautiful song Barbra Streisand made famous.  Oh, Oh, mem'ries.... (insert music note emoticons here).  They may be beautiful and yet.  Misty, water colored mem'ries.  You know the words... I was given this unique piece of artwork a couple of years ago.  I had recently started dating her son and we had personally met, though she lived over a thousand miles away.  She mailed it to him to give to me.  Maybe I had impressed her as the type of someone who might like a piece of her personally hand made artwork?  A work of art that she had personally made. The first home my ex and I had purchased was a 700sf war box in West Seattle.  Back in those days we didn't take photos of ourselves and our surroundings every step we took.  Taking pictures happened when we remembered to bring the camera.  Carrying around your Nikon like a purse wasn't the norm. It was a cute little house that sat perched up off the str...

A Flash of Time

"I wish somebody would have told me then, these are the good ole days" Macklemore sang to me on the radio as I raced to the airport a few weeks ago.  Didn't really think too much about it until I was flying home a couple of days later. I had gone to visit my parents to look through old photos and I found this one of my Nona with her beautiful sister-in-law Norina and fun loving daughter Anita.  They’re all standing around Nona’s stove.  Anita is pouring something into a strainer and Norina is smiling, with her cigarette, (yup, this was the early 70's, folks), with her back to the wall where Nona’s phone with the long curly tail hung.  I remember well the mustardy gold striped wallpaper and all of the custom cabinetry that Nono had made for the home they had lived in for many decades. This photo is screenplay stuff.  Nice screenplay stuff, like, my family really didn’t seem too controversial?!?  We weren’t oil tycoons or mobsters.  In this photo w...