WE BOUGHT A HOUSE ONLINE
ALM No.70, November 2024
ESSAYS
In the midst of the pandemic, when we lined up outside Safeway at dawn to buy toilet paper, and our President advised us to drink bleach if we fell ill, we purchased a 97-year-old house in Salt Lake City sight unseen. In October 2020, this was easier than buying hand sanitizer. During the long days, weeks, and months of confinement and quarantine, I'd been checking out houses on Zillow. I thought the glamor photos of a red-brick tutor boasting “classic charm and elegance, bathed in natural light” promising. My husband’s family are Utah natives, so we knew and loved the tree-lined streets in Yalecrest. The prior owner of the home on Herbert Avenue was an 87-year-old single lady who had died, but not from the spiky virus decimating the population, and thank God, not in the house. Her niece and executor, overwhelmed with teaching school via Zoom, was motivated to sell. Our realtor, who wanted her commission, assured us it would be easy to find short-term tenants until we were ready to move. We were restless and reckless as the pandemic moved across the world in great shattering waves. As it turns out, danger was right around the corner, but not from Covid.
We did find a skiing, environmentally-conscious family to rent our newly purchased house for the eight months before we retired. Our tenants were young, sophisticated, and good at home repair. We were none of these things. My husband once spent hours mounting a pencil sharpener above the desk in the cubby next to our utility room, positioning the hole for inserting the pencil smack dab against the wall. I was no better, so we combined our salaries to hire pencil sharpener installers.
We have strengths, too. For one thing, we believed in science and were glad to learn that our health-conscious tenants were anxious to be vaccinated. They were also anxious about dangerous chemicals, volatile organic compounds, noble gases, dust mites, and mold. So, we removed asbestos from a safe distance and installed carbon monoxide, radon, and smoke detectors. Since we had neither the skill nor inclination to negotiate, we gave in to all of our tenant's requests, except for replacing the carport with a garage to keep their Teslas warm in winter.
Our greenish-blue ranch-style stucco house in Tempe, Arizona, already resembled the Great Salt Lake. For 23 years, tributaries had deposited books, furniture, curtains, utensils, lamps, chairs, beds, and souvenirs with only a trickle of output. Acquisition had gone on night and day, smoothly, subtly, imperceptibly. And all sorts of dilemmas arose during the days of packing. Should we take the piano my husband played Mozart’s sonatas with artistic precision before music slipped away from his trembling fingers? And what about my barely used cooking paraphernalia? Peelers, shredders, juicers, crushers, apple corers, and grinders had died; their parts failed, went missing, or now separated from their apparatus, were no longer recognizable. I come from a long line of ambivalent chefs.
For months, we sorted and discarded, and I gave each flattened cardboard box in the garage a good shake, checking for scorpions before folding and taping it into a receptacle for the trappings of our lives. Lost sock drawers were dispatched, never be sorted again. Extension cords, flashlights, miscellaneous plugs, and raggedy dishtowels were tucked around the gently used kitchen gadgets in boxes headed for Deseret Industries. Things kept falling down on me: books tumbled out of bookcases, clothes streamed out of closets, and pills crashed out of cabinets. Now, these cabinets were also full of face masks.
By June, the heat was pulsating, pungent with eucalyptus and asphalt, and the rose bushes bordering our house bloomed and were desiccated by midday. It didn't take much willpower to get rid of an ugly, uncomfortable chair, but how do you decide what to do with 32 schoolyears of drawings, essays, report cards, sports trophies, and photos that accumulate when raising three boys? These bins, brimming with the substance of childhood, will follow me to the end of my days, only to be acquired by our middle-aged sons, who will be dismayed and pleased by comments from their kindergarten teachers.
As two of our three adult children left home, unexpected health problems took up residence in our older lives. Physical ailments were managed rather than healed, and we were coming to uneasy terms with limitations that had no limits. Our son living at home has autism, my husband has Parkinson’s, and I am an older woman. We intended to pack what we could the week before the professional movers arrived. But when the moving pod arrived, it loomed, intimidating and mostly empty for days. At the rate we were packing the truck, it would take a hundred days to haul the rest of our stuff up that steep incline. We needed more muscle. Thanks to plentiful vaccines, COVID’s daily death rate had dropped from thousands to hundreds, and flights had resumed. But another obstacle emerged. I’d convinced our sons, who were studying medicine and economics two states away, that We Were All Right. But we weren’t. Eventually, I called our youngest son, who could teach econometrics from anywhere, and asked him to fly home and help us load the truck. I stopped swimming against the current, away from my precious independence to something less than that.
Surveying the mountains of packed cardboard boxes with visual skills honed by a lifetime of playing video games, our son said, "I don't think all this stuff will fit in the truck." He was right despite the professional's best estimates. Still, we persisted and loaded as much as we could manage the week before we left, only to have the movers unload and reload everything, tucking boxes between, above, and below beds, dressers, and tables for maximum efficiency. There was a slap-stick quality to our careful packing of the truck, hasty unpacking, and not-so-careful repacking. An Ornate Tree Lizard ran down a vine hugging our stucco fence, laughed at us momentarily in the sunlight, and raced back again.
My husband’s best friend and his wife will be moving into a life-planned community. They messaged us a link so we could peruse the online equivalent of a glossy brochure of their soon-to-be-built high-rise apartment, promising active lifestyle options for older adults through comprehensive services and amenities. Yes, the concept of a continuum of care is inviting; just a few lovely friends, a few necessary things, and excellent meals prepared every day, almost like a cruise to an exotic location instead of one’s inevitable death. There would be a new, inviting social world, maid service, entertainment, instruction, a personal gym, a beauty shop, as well as promises of emotional tranquility, safety, and protection, transportation to medical care if necessary, and a subtext that we’d be so much healthier in this supportive, welcoming community, we’ll never be sick. But we love our dog and our son, who lives with us, and Parkinson’s is a disqualifying criterion for admission. So, we head for the beehive state like our pioneer ancestors.
We spent our first night in Utah with my brother-in-law and set out early the following day to finally see our new, very old home. After traveling 650 miles north, we’d hoped for a more dramatic drop in temperature—it wasn’t 114, but 98 was still hot. National Public Radio reported the Great Salt Lake, a remnant of Lake Bonneville, which once covered western Utah, was now four times as salty as the sea. Climate change and developers diverting water upstream were sucking the life out of the lake with its archaea, bacteria, phytoplankton, tons of brine shrimp, billions of brine flies, and millions of birds. If listeners weren’t concerned about the shrimp and shoreflies, there were practical reasons for preserving America’s Dead Sea. Without the "lake effect" increasing precipitation along the Wasatch Front, Utah wouldn't have the "Greatest Snow on Earth" and the $2 billion spent annually by skiers and snowboarders. Finally, the narrator made the consequences of not preserving the Great Salt Lake very personal. Continued shrinkage could turn the inland sea into a bowl of toxic dust, poisoning the air. I felt a tight band around my chest and told my husband, "I'm going to order some air purifiers.”
He rolled his eyes, thinking, perhaps, of the countless boxes of unused stuff we’d recently donated. “Do we really need more than one?”
“Do we need to breathe,” I replied, “in more than one room?”
We continued north on I-80, between the hazy profile of the Uinta Mountains to our left and the ecru-colored, tree-veined Wasatch to our right. The landscape was lovely, but the hot, dry wind carried the smell of trouble. Suddenly, from nowhere, a commercial truck merged into our lane. There was a loud bang from the collision and a prolonged sound of crunching metal while the right side of our 2007 Toyota van was shredded and the side view mirror sheared off. The time during a traumatic event expands and thins, like molten glass, before hardening and shattering. The name for this phenomenon is tachypsychia, from the Greek tach, meaning “speed,” and psych, meaning “mind.” So, despite the chaos and panic of this moment, I had time to form a thought. We are going to die before we see our new house. Our dog, Lizzie, catapulted from the back seat into my son’s lap. My husband cursed spectacularly while I struggled to keep the van under control, narrowly avoiding death and close enough to the rouge truck to report the license plate number to 911. The truck driver pretended to be oblivious to my angry honking, so I pulled alongside him. He refused to look at me, and maybe that’s just as well because although I’m not a violent person, there was violence in my eyes. My heart was beating like a boot kicking at the door. The police said if I could drive, I should keep driving, so I exited the freeway and navigated our wrecked van down narrow, sycamore-lined concrete streets. We finally managed a halting, comedic entrance into our driveway on Herbert Ave.
Our tenant came out of the house to hand over the keys. He was tall and lean, with steely-gray, chin-length curly hair combed straight back from a face shining with athleticism, the very image of an off-season Alpine Ace. In contrast, we looked and felt like we’d just been run over by a truck and smelled of fear. Gesturing to our vehicle, a mechanical version of road kill, I explained what happened. "Oh God," he said, “that’s awful.” Then, he grinned and pointed to a tiny chip in his incisor. “I tripped carrying a box upstairs.” We commiserated over our individual traumas: near death and a totaled minivan versus a sliver of missing tooth in a smile as white as the driven snow. Yes, I envied his youthful overabundance of health and almost intact good looks.
Walking into a house you have a sizable mortgage on but have never seen is like buying a ticket for a carnival fun-house, thrilling but full of jolts. For the most part, our small English Tudor bungalow was lovely as advertised: a gabled roof, hardwood floors, leaded windows, and glass doorknobs. What wasn’t advertised was the uneven pitch in the basement that rose and fell in each room in different and unique ways. Our old house was like a ship aloft a basement at sea. How could we buy a home we’d never stepped foot in? After all, you couldn't pack up a cute little Tudor purchased on a whim and drop it off at UPS for a quick Amazon return. Eventually, we positioned the footboard of my mother’s old mahogany bedframe at the bottom of the slope so guests would stay in bed.
The moving truck, with most of our belongings, had gotten as far as Las Vegas and inexplicably stopped. I called the moving company and was told in an exasperated, my-hands-are-tied-kind of voice that this coronavirus-caused interruption was unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. So, we bought air mattresses and set up camp in our empty house. We picnicked at Liberty Park and ate gelato for dinner. We walked up Yale, down Harvard, up Princeton, and down Michigan. This was a self-confident neighborhood, with yard signs promoting good manners. “Make America KIND Again” was more popular than “Please, Clean Up After Your Dog." But the most common sign read, “We love Thom.” Was Thom a politician, philanthropist, athlete, or candidate for the school board? No. According to the Tribune, he had the unlucky distinction of being hospitalized for 223 days due to COVID-19. During that time, he was resuscitated four times, intubated five times, and given CPR for 17 minutes. Not all of us will make it, and not all of us will perish. It’s not easy to discern the determining factors. Still, Thom was the man who lived and, like Harry Potter, given the number of placards in front of my neighbor’s homes, he is well loved.
Over the next few days, we were introduced to the dogs on Herbert Dr: sensible labs, designer poodle mixes, and mutts from the pound. Our dogs helped us feel less lonely during the pandemic despite all the people isolating at home, providing a reason to get outside, dissipating the trumped-up anger that flared now and then like a contagious “dis-ease.” Two dogs on our street had Addison’s disease, and a three-legged lab walked our neighborhood with a unique trotting gallop. Our neighbors loved to talk about their dog's ailments; there is solidarity in shared suffering, a recognition of all earthly wretchedness.
Something shifted for me one day as I lay on my back on our tiny patch of grass, watching squirrels scamper on power lines draped across the backyard. They jumped from a cable to a tree branch and tapped out a gay routine on the carport. The air was thick with lavender on this late summer afternoon with its verdigris tones. I was encircled by a chaotic kaleidoscope of roses, yellow and white daisies, lilac, jasmine, and orange trumpet vines. Everything in the backyard vibrated with bees, and my heart eased. Lizzie loved our postage stamp-sized yard, too, and her 11-year-old legs pumped the air like a puppy as she rolled in the grass. Alas, our reprieve was brief. During one of these stretches, she picked up a foxtail, and an infection bloomed on her head the morning the moving van finally arrived. Lizzie’s curly red hair was untidy over a swollen, winking eye as if she was trying to be cheerful even through her pain. She and I spent the day at the emergency vet across town while my husband, son, and his friend dealt with the movers.
After all the big furniture had been situated, we unwrapped our fine china, stemware, and vases. These were heirlooms moved from house to house over three generations, kept on shelves so long they were no longer seen but deemed indispensable all the same. I arranged these fragile keepsakes onto glass shelves in our oak cabinet and added a heavy blue glass vase to the top shelf, displaying the crystal rose my sister sent as a moving-in gift. A week later, we awoke to mayhem. The cabinet’s glass shelves had shattered, flinging bone china and goblets across the dining, kitchen, and living room, embedding slivers of glass in hidden places we would come across later in our bare feet. My husband said, “Let’s go back to bed.”
Yes, moving is a dangerous business; things happen. The negligent truck driver was not our fault; an innocent but insidious foxtail caused the abscess on Lizzie’s head. I admit some responsibility for the overburdened china hutch. When chatting with our new neighbors, I’d say, “Let me tell you what happened.” My misadventures made me strangely interesting. There is a universality in our little tragedies. After all, we are the victims of others, natural catastrophes, and ourselves daily. Our stories are retold, maybe even embellished over the years, turning misfortune not into art but rather a low comedy.
About a month after we’d moved, we were still dealing with boxes that had taken stubborn refuge in the carport. We donated about two hundred books to the Book Exchange, dispersing them like seeds from a dandelion. We kept Waldon’s Pond, a book my husband continually reads, and were reminded, “…life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." Thoreau’s warnings to keep track of your valuables, travel light, and try new adventures, as well as his clear-eyed willingness to look at what is to be seen and gratitude for what is growing in the yard, seemed good advice. Finally, a month of adrenaline drained from me. Later that night in the fragrant twilight, pleasantly exhausted, we sat in the driveway on our newly discovered camp chairs, looking away from the troublesome boxes and toward the sidewalk with its parade of neighbors and their dogs, and heard the reassuring sounds of life-going-on, the lament of cricket and the flute-like lullaby of the hermit thrush.
Sharman Ober-Reynolds was born in Los Angeles and completed a master’s in fine arts at Arizona State University. For over thirty years, she worked in health care as a family nurse practitioner, primarily in autism research. She is primary author of The FRIEND Program for Creating Supportive Peer Networks for Students with Social Challenges, including Autism. In 2023, Sharman was the first-place recipient of the Olive Woolley Bert Awards and has published creative non-fiction in bioStories and Adelaide Literary Magazine. Sharman now lives and writes in an old house in Salt Lake City with her family and Cadoodle.