My Stepladder Was On National Television

Last night, the HGTV television program House Hunter featured our home in Old Trees, Missouri (Still available! Cheap!).

We haven’t lived there in a year and a half (sellers ready to make a deal!). Right after we moved out, we had the entire top floor painted. Then, when we changed realtors, we had the house staged, so it’s full of furniture that’s nicer than ours (and which is not charged monthly, thankfully). The porch swing, mounted on a frame instead of hanging from the porch roof, is in the backyard now. My garden, which I tore out of an asphalt driveway with a sledgehammer, a pick, and a shovel, is gone; it’s a patch of grass now.

So it’s our house, but it’s different enough and distant enough that it’s not acute. The only things distinctly ours are the stepladder tucked into the main floor laundry (along with a large supply of light bulbs and 9-volt batteries to keep the rooms lit and the smoke detectors from beeping–one thing that made an unused home seem more unused when we were looking was the unrespiting bleating of abandoned smoke detectors) and the cherry tree in the front yard which should produce a pretty nice crop this year.

I do miss a couple things from the house. The next-door neighbor was often available for a hey,-how-are-you that would turn into a 40 minute chat. We could walk out the front door and walk everywhere. We could sit on our front porch and watch the neighbors walk or drive by (we could even talk, no matter what the “highway noise” complainers, and there have been many) say (loudly).

If it would have aired earlier in the winter, I might have been more wistful. But now that the spring is tipping its hand, the benefits of this house in the mountains are tugging at my sleeve. I spent part of yesterday morning cleaning out our inherited burn pile for an eventual rose garden and in building up a raspberry patch with peat and soil. Later today, I might pick up a couple of fruit trees for the orchard. Also, even though the Springfield murder rate more than doubled last year, it rose to 7. Total. In St. Louis, that’s called a weekend.

It was a strange experience, and a bit exciting, and ultimately the couple who were “considering” our house said mostly nice things about the house. Maybe it will spur some interest in that house so we can finally unload it and get to saving money and thinking about the future.

Also, I’ll need to remember that stepladder.