Selling A Home
Buying or selling a home is a high stakes proposition. A family needs a 
dwelling suitable to their lifestyle as well as a neighborhood amenable to all family members. Realtors, bankers, and several lawyers — are involved in the conversation. A home sale cuts wide into the successive rings of society: familial, legal, financial, and the gritty commercial.
If the pieces are a good enough fit, and if the conversation can be nurtured to conclusion with sensitivity and care, everyone’s needs can be met, and the hand-off of a home, to a deserving family can be brought to a happy fruition. That is how I look at the process anyway. That is my hope. Then again I am an idealist.
Our realtor called last night saying that she has an offer, and will drop by the house today at 3PM to discuss it with us. I am relieved and eager to hear what she has to say. We have enjoyed our home for a good number of years. I’ve been satisfied with many seasons of effort maintaining the yard, and with lessons that have come from growing a vegetable garden. Perhaps I have recovered a little of the heritage of my ancestors who lived by their labor and the goodness of the plowed land in North Carolina. Really important lessons cannot be learned in the abstract, but only by doing, hands-on. Caring for your own plot of soil is how one starts.
In our life on this place, I think that I have a sense of the debt that I owe to my forbears– to my father and mother, my grand parents, and to those before them. I read about such un-payable debts this morning in a short story entitled, It Wasn’t Me, written in 1953 by Wendell Berry. The story is about our obligation to those who have come before us, by whose support, and unsolicited help we have reached the condition of well being which we now enjoy. Berry writes of such a debt:
It’s not accountable, because we are dealing in goods and services that we didn’t make, that can’t exist at all except as gifts. Everything about a place that’s different from its price is a gift. Everything about a man or woman that’s different from their price is a gift. The life of a neighborhood is a gift….so there’s lots of giving and taking without a price—some that you don’t remember, some that you never knew about. You don’t send a bill. You don’t, if you can help it, keep an account.
—excerpt, The Wild Birds, (short stories) It Wasn’t Me p. 73 by Wendell Berry
