We've sold the Minneapolis house

Or at least we now have a signed purchase agreement. What a perilous time to be selling your house. We feel lucky that some PLUs (people like us) loved ours enough--with its small kitchen perfect for opening take-out containers and its one-car garage, along with its three bathrooms and architect-designed master suite--to make an offer.

We always thought it would take a gay man or a couple with no kids to appreciate the house's appeal: it's been meticulously kept, the finished attic and basement remodeling we did are stunning, it's eight minutes from the airport. Our buyers are an unmarried het couple with no kids. We think this is their first time buying a house. They got ours for a SONG.

Much has happened in the two months and three weeks since I've written a post. We completed the purchase of our Port Richey house. We traveled there together in mid-June to visit and care for it and initiate things like pest control and window cleaning. We put our Minneapolis house on the market in mid June (a huge job), held open houses and had showings, having every time to cart dozens of items like cat furniture, cat litter boxes, kitchen garbage can and bedroom TV sets out to the garage, usually in horrible heat, so the house would be perfectly staged and de-cluttered. No wet towels, no personal items in the bathrooms, no pet food bowls. Then after each showing, cart it all back in again. That disruptive, tedious process has now paid off.

I've been rejected for three higher education jobs in our new area and am concentrating right now on learning how to teach on-line. I'm already hired by one of my University of Minnesota gigs to teach two sections of a class on-line from Florida, which I'm so glad about. It lets me maintain close contact with that group of colleagues who I'm kind of in love with and I get to learn new, of-the-moment skills. Plus it's all a good fit for my temperament. I may do more of it if I get good at it.

My friends came for a goodbye-for-now party in mid July. Bruce's friends are giving him one in early September. We engaged a moving company and then changed our original move date of August 3rd to mid September. Bruce's Colorado brother, Michael, was remarried just a couple weeks ago to his long-time love, Sheryl. We went to their wedding, amidst needing to have an open house that weekend and our impending move. People have started to ask me, how is packing going? And I think, oh, yeah, maybe I should get some boxes and make a schedule. With the house sold (provided it passes inspection and our buyers get their financing), maybe that can become a real activity.

TigerRobin, our senior cat, and I were both in the emergency room last week. My episode was dramatic: Bruce was at our Florida house and my friend, Kim, was with me, thank goddess. I went from feeding the cats to dropping into a kind of "child's pose" on the floor and was soon completely incapacitated with a kidney stone. I could barely communicate with Kim, had to concentrate really hard to be able to tell her Bruce's phone number or what button to push on my cell phone, and I could barely crawl. I don't know how long I was like that before I asked her to call an ambulance, maybe 30 minutes? Maybe 45? The ambulance was the first crescendo of the whole thing because it meant the pain was too acute for me to handle, even during a car ride with Kim to the hospital. Thank you, western medicine, for EMTs who can pull up in a noisy rig, get you onto their stretcher, thread in an IV and shoot you up with morphine. The second crescendo was hours later, after more morphine and a CT scan, when I was released and able to walk upright--though still as the owner of an unpassed kidney stone.

Tiger's ER trip was stressful for her (and for her mom). I had to drive her there, alone, the second day after my kidney stone and we were both upset. The emergency vet did blood work and took x-rays and we learned Tiger has early kidney disease, something we are glad to know. They gave her a shot of pain medication in order to be able to handle her since she's quite grumpy naturally and that seemed to take days to wear off. And then just last night, our housecall vet came to see her. She has a respiratory infection and swollen glands around her mouth that have her coughing, sneezing and not terribly interested in food. The housecall vet gave her a shot of antibiotic but I now have to figure out how to get pills down her twice a day for the next few days. And that will likely be ongoing--both vets suggested we give her prevacid to protect her tummy lining from chemicals her kidneys can no longer filter out that may make her nauseous. She's lost the better part of a pound since April. Plus, she may eventually need subcutaneous fluids to keep her properly hydrated. We're going to try giving her some of those a couple times before our long car trip to Florida.

I've gotten to spend a lot of time with Tiger the last week as we've both been recovering. I think she's liked it. I know I have.

Bruce has traveled twice to the Port Richey house to tend and occupy it. It now has a security system, cable, phone and wireless installed. Our front steps and the little "deck" that holds our air-conditioner (everything must be elevated to second floor level in Florida in case of flooding) have been re-sealed. Our "lawn" has been mowed and a landscape consultant located. Bruce wants to put paving stones in our back "yard" and has made the design for it with the landscaper. Carpenter ants our pest control person discovered in June have been knocked down and thwarted. We live right next door to the wild--that's what we love about the house--so some of our strange, winged, crawling neighbors will just have to be tolerated. Twice when Bruce was there last week, cranes and herons were resting on the roof of our house. As though it were a weigh station before the wilderness. Bruce found a place to get take-out lasagne and watched baseball a couple of times at our neighborhood bar and restaurant. He figured out some important things about our little speed boat, which we're bringing with us--it would be almost impossible to back the boat into our garage. The driveway curves and the garage door openings are quite narrow. So he's located a marina that will store and retrieve the boat for us every time we want to use it (for a price that makes sense).

He is growing more accustomed to what living in Florida will mean--he won't as readily be able to call Jorg, Tony or Tom for spur of the moment lunches or ball games. His clients have so far been very responsive to the news that we're relocating and that's a relief. He will be back in Minneapolis a lot for gigs because many of his clients are here, so we're kind of fashioning a new way to live two places. Different paradigm than renting a Key West house in January. I'm less anxious about leaving my chinese medicine doctor/acupuncturist, yoga place, haircut person and eyebrow woman. I'll find a new acupuncturist with Dr. Ren, my current doctor's, help and there must be plenty of yoga in the Tampa Bay area. Joining Angie's List to find a good independent computer consultant was really smart (something our independent computer consultants here, Chipheads, suggested) and I can use it for acupuncture and yoga, too.

Florida just doesn't have good hair and eyebrow people, though. I'll just have to come back here for that.

Moving is four weeks away.

I feel some concern about the area we're moving to. The unemployment and foreclosure rates are some of the highest in Florida, which has some of the highest in the country. My google alerts are often about crime (though one was about a woman who set a file cabinet on fire so she could get to "legitimately" leave work early). We have to be registered to vote by October 4th--no same day registration for Florida. The state's AG, former House Manager Bill McCollum, vigorous prosecutor of Bill Clinton's impeachment, just made up an immigration law in some ways worse than Arizona's. Some other woman running for office wants to set up camps for illegal immigrants, like--she thinks--the WWII internment camps (which of course didn't contain illegal immigrants). And then there's Marco Rubio.

But here, there's Tom Emmer. And Michelle Bachmann. And Diamond Lake Road in deplorable condition, until about two days ago.

We'll see.

Here's where we are

It's a Sunday morning and we're in Arizona. This was going to be our second explore-a-move trip. We scheduled it back in April, along with the Florida trip we took in early May.

I remember the weekend we decided we were going to have to get on a plane and go see and feel the Pasco-Hernando County area in Florida that Bruce was falling in love with on the internet.  I had applied for a job at the community college there. Our early strategy about moving was that I'd apply at community colleges in places we thought we'd like and then we'd see if I got an interview somewhere. Reports from our friends about this north-of-Tampa area weren't great. We heard it was "blue collar." "Tacky." Not at all like the part of Key West we've spent so much time in, or Sarasota where Bruce went to New College.

It was becoming clear to me that we were going to have to make decisions about moving without any job offer. Bruce was staying up every night until 2a.m. looking at real estate on the internet (exactly as he did before we bought our Eden Prairie house in 1999). He was also starting to correspond with residents of the Pasco-Hernando county area--a journalist, a business woman/community activist (who wound up referring us to our Florida realtor)--to find out what living there was like. He would call me in to our office several times each evening to look at various houses he'd found and studied. He was sort of bonding with the area. There came a point when I just said we have to get our feet on the ground there to experience the place, before this goes any farther.

Then our thinking shifted.  We realized that if we could check out an area of Florida we thought we might like--without a job offer but with community colleges in the area--then we could check out parts of Phoenix and Virginia as well.  We scheduled two trips that weekend--Florida and Phoenix. We never got Virginia on the calendar.  As you know, one day in to the Florida trip, we saw Damen Lane in Port Richey.

Here is where we spent so much time thinking and processing and talking those few days in Florida. We used Marriott points to stay here in Clearwater, which was our base as we drove either north or south each day to explore.

You can see a little "tiki roof" on the left at the end of the boardwalk (in the picture with the couple walking). That's an outdoor bar where we had a couple important sessions. And we spent a lot of time talking in the mornings and evenings in the living room--before and after driving around all day.

We covered so much territory on that trip; intense inner landscapes and outward tropical terrain. The first thing I had to get used to in a hurry was that Key West does not equal Florida proper. One of the next things we had to sort out, because we were falling so hard for the Damen house, was that maybe--like our favorite saying "You don't take a trip. A trip takes you."--the same principle applied to what we were contemplating here. You don't make a move. A move makes you. Instead of insisting on figuring everything out ahead of time, maybe the move itself is a kind of alchemy that gets you rearranged. That may sound magical but magical is how the Damen house feels to us. In a psychic reading my friend Kim did for us, she said: "Part of the appeal of this home is that...animals and birds will come right into your yard and they will teach you many things in which you will delight. The animals watch over the burial ground [in what we call "the nature preserve" directly north of us we're told there are Indian burial sites], the old ones watch over the animals--it's a symbiotic relationship. You will have experiences here that you won't be able to explain, but after a while they will seem like everyday occurrences. The house has been "looking for" some humans who will appreciate the beauty and history of its surroundings. No coincidence that this property captured your heart." The magic was already afoot.

Here's where we are right now, in Scottsdale. At a Westin in the lap of luxury. We traded a week of our timeshare to get here.
I spent hours in the tub last night reading about the HBO series Treme in the Sunday NYT magazine.

We have an entire "villa," which is like one big apartment and one little apartment. The big apartment has a full kitchen, the bathroom pictured above (plus a huge shower), a balcony and king-sized bed in the bedroom. The little apartment has its own living room, kitchenette, balcony, queen size bed in the bedroom, and not-as-splendid bathroom. I have the bed in the little apartment for one more night, before Bruce's brother Michael and our soon-to-be official sister-in-law Sheryl arrive tomorrow.

We spent all of yesterday afternoon sitting outside on couches under palo verde trees (drinking a couple mimosas). We had to wrestle with heart vs. head concerns about buying Gulf coast property 40 days into the BP oil volcano. We try like crazy to honor Bruce's "head" concerns about why doing this now is irrational. But our hearts win every time, in every discussion we have.

We need to be sure because the closing date on Damen is May 28th.

Reality

We waited all day to get back our signed purchase agreement contract from the seller of our house today.  At four minutes after midnight, just now, our realtor sent word that she at last has the contract. A 12-day clock starts now for us to complete a building inspection, a bug inspection, a sink hole inspection and a survey.

I'm glad about the contract being finalized--thank you, Mercury, direct yesterday at 5:30pm--but I've spent a lot of today feeling anxious and insecure.  The insecurity is kind of ancient but it got aroused this morning during a phone conversation when I resigned from one of my three teaching gigs. I'd planned to do it but not this morning and not over the phone. I was nervous during the brief conversation and developed a sort of amnesia about what I actually said. I think I had a bit of an out-of-body experience.  The upshot is, I think I was quite appropriate and strong on the phone but I didn't know it until the end of the day. I spent the intervening hours contending with insecurity, anxiety and shame. Which even now I'm still feeling the remnants of in my gut.

The whole episode also made a little more real the fact that I'm moving to Florida in the next few months.  I now listen to the news as though I'm already a Florida resident, tuning in to Charlie Crist's every word and indifferent to calls from the DFL.

Bruce and I call our home Cross Creek.  The real Cross Creek is where Florida author Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings lived and worked and Bruce loves the area. Now we have our own Cross Creek. Reminding myself of how it feels standing on our land is soothing.  But the reality of moving and all it means--no soup from Cafe Latte, no spur of the moment therapist appointments, no more teaching at the one gig I resigned from--was just there today.  This move isn't academic any more; it's happening.

Done Effin deal

We got our house!!

Lashed to the tracks

Today, it seems that our lovely home-in-waiting has been seized and lashed to the railroad tracks, or to the stake. I've started sending messages to the land saying, "Rise up! Do something!" The scheming villain twirling his moustache seemingly in control of her fate has become even more confounding. I don't know how to rescue her.  Except by making supplication to the spirits and beings of the land.

But my petitions are too modern: "Don't be a victim! Rise up!"

If this were a movie, Bruce and I would ride down to Florida, stake out the villain's lair and confront him with glares, six-shooters and righteousness.

Here's what has us dazed

We're moving.  We don't know the details but we fell in love and are having a torrid affair with this house.

We've "proposed" but are still in negotiations. It's on a living, breathing little bayou which is the water you see.  The tide comes in and out from the Gulf of Mexico twice a day.  Our neighbors on one side are osprey, eagles, cranes and egrets and they live on a protected wildlife preserve.  Which also contains sacred Indian sites of some sort.

This piece of land is alive.

Think of how far you'll go, and how creative you can get, when you're having an affair with the love of your life. That's what it feels like we're doing.

Don't know yet if we'll get the house but it seems like it's been waiting for us.  We've gone through twists and turns and murkiness and intensity the last week trying to make a deal.  It feels like Florida property flippers, who own the house, are senselessly holding our home captive.  Demanding some kind of dowry-ritual on their terms and their terms only while meanwhile, one of the palm trees on our property needs watering.

Mercury's been retrograde the whole time and won't change direction til tomorrow night.  Really the last thing you should do with Mercury retrograde is sign a contract for a house.  Thousands of gallons of oil are shooting into the Gulf of Mexico daily.  Daily.  The astrologers think perhaps by the end of May something will have quieted that volcano.  Are we crazy?

It's time for us to move and change our lives.  Since we met this house eight days ago, all we've done is imagine ourselves in it. We planned to check out three potential states for our move: Florida, Arizona and Virginia.  We scheduled trips to Florida and Phoenix.  We saw our house/love the first day of the first trip to the first state, within two hours of beginning our research.  Yes, we've been part-time residents of Key West for the last five winters, Bruce went to college in Sarasota, his parents had a condominium in Bonita Beach decades ago.  But still, this could look impulsive.

We've been in a daze imagining ourselves and our cats and our lives in our new home. Dazed comes from dasen, from Old Norse dasa, perhaps originally meaning (says the online entymology dictionary) "to make weary with cold."  And of course we're beyond "weary with cold."  So we're dazed in more ways than one.