Tales of Retirement
By Pat O’Connor
High School Teacher
Retired 1999
Selling a house is a little like making love for the first time.
Along with the underlying excitement, there are doubts: will I do this right? will she think my body unattractive? how will I compare to her previous partners? has she had a lot of partners? is she free of disease? am I ready for this? will I smell alright? will I even get an erection?
And here, 46 years later, I’m preparing to do it: not make love, but sell a house. Forty-six years later, I am experiencing performance anxiety. We’ve never sold a house before. We’ve never experienced people filing judgmentally through our home… and rejecting us. Never have we had to keep the place so clean. Never has an errant crumb or a white flake of dandruff on a blue carpet ever threatened our future.
Wary knees and wanderlust
And why after 46 years of improving a place would we leave it? The answer is simple: we are getting on. Our knees are getting warier of stairs. Yardwork is now labour, where it used to be love. We want to travel more and that translates to a smaller house, one that would leave appropriate profit from its sale. We’re even considering renting, so we could easily give into wanderlust at a whim: just lock the door and go.
There was a stretch in my youth when I prided myself on never going to a doctor; when the only medication I might take was an aspirin. At that time, I also saw realtors as parasites who got paid for doing what any homeowner should do for him or herself. Then, when body parts got beyond their best-before date, doctors became indispensable. So too, with older eyes, I see the benefit of a large marketplace for the house: hence, our realtor.
Consequently, we have modestly ‘staged’ the house. We have culled books, pitched the sentimental, patched the holes, touched up the scratches, and used Kijiji for the first time.
Letting go to a new lover
Now, we wait for some buyer to find us worthy. Someone who knows nothing of the monumental events of this home. They will have no awareness of the feasts and fun that mobs of people revelled in under this roof. They will probably change much in the house. They may even level it and start anew.
But then who knows? Where we move to may be even better. Perhaps buying a second house is like making love once you know what you are doing.