The Coffee Table

A Nomad’s Nightmare

My parents didn’t own a home until I was an adult and living on my own. For all of my childhood, my family was of the rental persuasion. We moved a lot. I’d lived in four states by the time I finished high school, and followed my parents to a fifth, shortly after graduation. Always renting. And then they suddenly lost their way: They moved to yet another state and bought a house. 

Prior to my parents’ sudden transformation into homeowners, it never occurred to me that buying a house was possible. I didn’t even realize many people stay in one town all their lives—until I met my best friend in high school, who had always lived in the same house, which her family owned. I had viewed homeownership as the stuff of fairytales.

I don’t remember why I finally became a homeowner. Maybe because my first husband grew up in a home-owning family. But several years after we were married, we bought a small house on 5 acres. Shortly thereafter we were divorced. Cause and effect? Your guess is as good as mine.

I have been owner/co-owner of four houses I’ve lived in.  (Well, five—if you count the one I recently purchased, and which now contains half my belongings.) The first got lost in the divorce. The second got sold for a pittance long after my sweetie (and co-owner) moved to another state (my 6th) for work. Long distance land-lording was not our forte. 

The third got washed away—completely—in a hurricane. And now, number four is on the precipice of being sold, with last minute bugaboos threatening the closing every day. Meanwhile house number 5, (750 miles away) contains half my stuff and most of my heart and has me mortgaged up to my eyebrows while I try to tie up these loose homeowner ends in Arkansas.

How did this happen to me? Renters are untethered. They can pack up and move with no need to look back. People who feel compelled to buy a new house when selling an old one (I use the terms old and new loosely. My new home is actually fifty years older than my old home) find themselves engaged in a capitalist process that involves lenders, Realtors™ inspectors, attorneys, title examiners and settlement agents, all speaking a tongue that is generally not my native language—and all of whom get a little piece of the pie. The pie, of course, refers to the money the buyers and sellers are about to exchange.  

Homeownership is a trap. Once you own one, it’s difficult to get out from under. It becomes a sort of addiction—going back to renting feels like a step down. A social demotion. After all, part of the American Dream is homeownership. Yet sometimes it’s a nightmare.

I am nomadic in my soul, but now I have too much stuff to travel easily. I should have bought a camper or an old school bus instead of another house and forced myself to pare down my possessions dramatically. But motor vehicles depreciate so rapidly, I feared I’d be throwing away my money. (Like renting?) And they always need repair. I don’t know anything about engines or camper septic systems.  

That was faulty thinking. I can’t take care of a house without calling a plumber, carpenter or electrician. Why should my school bus be any different? 

So here I am, stuck on the precipice of selling a house, continually recalculating how and when to get on with my new life.  A renter paying the price of an owner’s addiction.