Testament to sad times
Kasia April 7th, 2009
There are a lot of vacant or auction homes right now, and a lot of people without homes or jobs. I’m not sure why this particular auction home makes me so sad, except maybe that I’ve loved this house for years and wished I could buy it.
I don’t think that’s the only reason, though. It’s definitely one reason – here my dream house is going up for auction starting at $10,000 and I can’t buy it. That’s grounds to be a little bummed.
For those who are wondering why not: terms of sale are cash, for one thing; and I already have a mortgage on the little condo Canuck and I are calling home, for another. Unloading a property in Michigan in this economy is the stuff prayers are made of (which is why that house is up for auction right now). Besides, on my salary we’re in no position to maintain a house like that. Even if we got the house for $40 or $50 K, and could finance it, what happens when you need a new roof, or the septic field – which I guarantee that house has – goes kaputt? Old houses need ready cash. (Just ask my poor dad, who has owned several, including a notorious money pit about fifty years older than the house we’re talking about, and a barn of a house from the 1920s that was, I gather, a nightmare to heat.)
Anyway. I can see that that’s part of what’s making me sad.
But I think more of it is that I’m looking at this 100+ year old house – maintained very well if the exterior is any indicator – that someone else has loved and lost.
People other than me loved this house enough to maintain it to last the past 108 years: through wars and the Depression and lots of lean times. And maybe it’s my imagination, but I think it looks like a house that’s held a lot of love. How do you fill four bedrooms, but with family and friends?
But the last someone who had this house…who knows? Maybe they couldn’t afford it when they bought it. Or maybe they bought a different house expecting to be able to sell this one (because it’s been on the market for some time), only to find that the bubble had burst, and they made two payments for as long as they could, until… Or maybe they lost a job – or two, or more - and simply ran out of savings.
I don’t personally know anyone who I know to have fallen in the first category, but I know plenty of people who fall in the other two. And I suppose a lot of what’s making me so sad about this house is that it reminds me of those people. It reminds me of friends and acquaintances who, through bad decisions or bad luck (and in some cases, both) have lost their financial footing and are trying to get it back in other, less economically ravaged areas. It reminds me of others I know who are on the edge, or near it, and who are living every day with the knowledge that that could happen to their house next.
Yeah.
I think that’s why I’m so sad to see it up for auction.
It’s Michigan in a nutshell.
The only consolation I can offer is that there are people who have lived in apartments or trailer parks who now can afford the priced-to-sell houses.
Very true.
Assuming, of course, that they didn’t buy their trailer. Those things are a bear to resell in the best of times.
I know what you mean. We frequently think about the family who used to own our house. It was evidently foreclosed and then bought by a couple of guys who fixed it up, which is who we bought it from. According to the neighbors the previous owners had three boys– a couple of twins and a baby. Of course we knew they had kids cause they left the slide and swings that my daughters now love playing on, which we would not have been able to afford to buy. I think about the people who planted the flowers I’ve been enjoying this spring and how they probably never imagined they wouldn’t still be here to enjoy them. It makes me sad. I pray for them that they are ok and have a nice place to live now, somehow.