Moving On

Once upon a time, I was caught in a rip current while snorkeling in Mexico.  This could have been the end of me but instead it became a powerful metaphor for the way life can sometimes change direction and velocity without warning.  After easing my way back toward shore, I was two miles away from where I had entered the ocean, tired but exhilarated at having outsmarted an irresistible force of nature.

When my husband lost his job in August, which was the reason we had relocated to Florida in 2005 from the rolling hills of Virginia, it was as if another rip current had pulled me away from the known world.  My husband's first instinct was to put the house on the market immediately and sell off everything of value that we owned.  Remembering my experience in Mexico, where the stakes were much higher, I advised him to slow his thinking down and analyze the situation.  For reasons I do not fully understand, Beau has always acted as if homelessness was a missing paycheck away.  Our financial adviser explained that, while we weren't rolling in dough, we had a generous cushion and could live with no income indefinitely as long as we changed our spending habits.  It took a while for Beau to internalize this message.

Meanwhile, at age 60, Beau began pounding the pavement in search of another full-time, salaried job.  He found a number of jobs which he could do with no learning curve to surmount, but every hiring manager he spoke with explained that he was "overqualified", in other words too old. So we decided to regroup.  The Florida Bar requires every practicing attorney to take the dreaded Bar exam. That was not going to happen, so we looked north and discovered that Georgia's Bar was much more friendly:  a lawyer in good standing with no criminal history can qualify.  Atlanta was the obvious destination.

In the fall, we met with a real estate agent who gave us a to-do list for getting our house ready to sell.  We did everything except clean out the girls' bedrooms, leaving that for after the Christmas holidays.  Shortly after the children returned to their schools, we de-cluttered and cleaned their rooms, replaced unattractive wall art and bed linens and rearranged furniture.  A photographer captured the beauty of the home and landscape and after eight weeks of sweating, we found a buyer.

Florida's real estate market was slowly recovering from the crash of 2008, so instead of losing a fortune, we only lost the equivalent of a three bedroom house in an anonymous suburb.  After paying off the mortgage, we would have just enough to buy a decent house in less expensive housing market.  Friends and family in Atlanta encouraged us to move there because the market was still depressed.  They could not have been more wrong:  every house we liked received multiple offers and sold over asking price.  It occurred to me that we would feel poor in Atlanta and we would spend inordinate amounts of time stuck in traffic.  So we looked at smaller towns an hour or so away.

Finally, we settled on a town where our real estate dollar would go far, or so we thought.  It turns out that Atlanta's satellite towns suffer from an overabundance of outdated and unappealing homes and a scarcity of good real estate.  While the prices were lower, the good houses sold like high jackpot powerball tickets.  Worn out houses in popular locations sold for more than we could afford and turnkey houses in terrible locations simply would not work.  It took months of looking at endless internet postings of homes for sale and visits to homes that sounded promising until we found the perfect little house.  We made an offer, the sellers countered, we counter-countered, and the sellers decided to wait.  Two days later, after hearing that we were in competition with a cash buyer, we offered $15 thousand over the asking price and removed all of our contingencies.  The cash buyer won and we were back to looking at houses.

This period of riding a current over which we have no control could have been my undoing.  I often think about drinking, about how soothing a glass of Pinot Noir would be, about the warm feeling inside, and then I realize that the reason I am able to outsmart the rip current that is relocating us is the serene feeling that has replaced alcohol.  Somewhere in our future home town, there is a home for us, but in the interim we slowly and patiently move in the direction of solid ground. 

Copyright 2014 Serena Englander, all rights reserved