My parents have been out looking at houses. This, by itself, is nothing remarkable. It's like a hobby to them, looking at houses. Has been for years. They've actually gone out for the sole purpose of looking at houses that they have no intention of even considering thinking about buying. That's how insane this is.
But this time, they're thinking about moving.
STORY ALERT~ May 1995. I'm finishing up my junior year at college, and during finals week I talked to my parents and learned that I'll have to come home by myself. That meant packing my car (brown '83 Cavalier; originally Mom's) with the contents of my dorm room and driving two hours. During the conversation, nothing was said about a possible move. Nothing was even said about a trip to look at houses.
I get on the street to my house and there's a "For Sale" sign out front. I have no idea what's going on. My parents aren't home yet, so I unpacked the car and sat in the driveway, waiting for them. I think Mom got home first, and she got out of the car and I didn't say anything, but pointed to the sign. Turns out they'd mistakenly thought they'd told me.
Anyway, the house was sold a couple months later, but the house Mom and Dad were having built wouldn't be ready until February, and the buyers neded to be in at the end of October - like my dad, they were moving here because the husband had been transferred to McGuire Air Force Base. So we (including our sheepdog) spent Thanksgiving and Christmas in this tiny two-bedroom apartment.
The winter of 1995 was pretty bad and knocked construction behind schedule, so the house now wouldn't be finished until March. It was - just barely missing the Blizzard of '96.
And now they've both decided that the place is too big for the two of them, so I learned tonight that they've been looking into "adult communities." I think a lot of the stuff that happened this summer with the toilet flooding and everything that came out of that had a lot to do with it, plus it really is just a lot of house and property to manage that they don't even really use. When we first moved in, I thought it strange even then that they would move up to a bigger house when I was about to graduate from college and wasn't expecting to come back at all (I was still hopelessly optimistic that I'd actually, you know, get a job right out of college. I thought that still happened. I ended up staying in that house for five years after that.), so I end up being right eight years after the fact.
Ah, well. At least this time it won't be a surprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment