Wishing and Hopin'

I hauled my four kids all over metro Atlanta, looking for a perfect piece of land.  We drew a circle around Norcross, GA, where Ken worked at the big Lucent plant….anything within an hour of there was fair game.  I’d throw everybody in our pimped-out conversion van with  PBJ sandwiches, a box of Little Debbies and a jug of frozen water.  We’d map out our route and then drive around looking for land.  We did this for years.  This was our main form of entertainment and certainly the main reason I put so many miles on that van. It had 290,000 on it when we sold it to an enterprising paint crew.  We’d finish school before lunch and I’d pull out of the driveway, so excited that I had to make myself slow down and not get another ticket.  The cops in Cobb County are not very sympathetic to people like me….I never have figured that out.  They must have some sort of heat-seeking beacon that finds me.  I cry, I argue, I act stoic, I tell them funny tales….but none of those tactics work.  I tell them about my kids and how I was distracted by the bow and arrow that my son was shooting or the addition of a stray cousin was just too much for me to keep my focus.  But in a cold, hard voice the cop tells me to hand over my license and registration.  They never act like they like me. Why is that?  Everybody likes me. Well, everybody but cops and librarians.  If they could know that I understand the rules but that they don’t apply to me. If only.

Me and the kids would hike all over the land, some of it beautiful, some of it ugly and barren.  We’d narrow down the places we liked, and then we’d haul Papa out there on the weekend.  We’d find a piece we liked or an old homeplace that needed renovating..we’d put an offer on it, contingent on our house selling, and then wait.  We did a lot of waiting.  After we put our house up for sale, we waited over 2 years before it sold.  Do you know how hard it is to keep your house “show-ready”with four young children who are home all the time, just so people can look at it and say, “Well, the floor plan is weird”?  Or – they’d put a contract on it and we’d wait for a month and at the last minute the lender would figure out that these people couldn’t qualify for the loan.  I began to get very jaded with real estate agents (maybe that's why I decided to become one later?).  I'd tell them over and over what I wanted to see -- either a house on land or just plain acreage.  How hard can that be?  They'd take me out to look. We'd pull up into some cul-de-sac in a neighborhood and there would be this cookie-cutter split-level house, when I had clearly told them we wanted land, not an acre in a subdivision.  Later, I found out that the realtor's mantra is "Buyers are liars and liars are buyers."  Well, I hate to lie and I certainly don't buy things, particularly large investments, that I don't want.  When I’d pray, I would get very frustrated that God was holding up this process.  Well-meaning people would say that maybe we weren’t supposed to move.  But we had to move, had to get out of Marietta/Smyrna.  It felt like we were aliens in a foreign land.  Now that we’ve been in west Georgia all these years, I am still astonished at how much I feel at home here. 

We wanted to get out of debt.  We had already bought and sold several fixer-uppers since early in our marriage.  We had a dream of fixing up and selling homes until we were able to pay cash for one.  We had read and heard Larry Burkett and Dave Ramsey, but particularly the Scriptures that said, “The borrower is servant to the lender.”  We had seen other people do some pretty crazy stuff, and we really didn’t know we couldn’t do anything, so in our youth and ignorance we dove in.   People talk about how wallpapering with your spouse can break up your marriage….honey, we’d already tore out, put back, fixed up, chinked it, sawed it, spliced it, painted, sold it and moved 7 times before we’d been married 6 years.  Every year we either bought a fixer upper or had a baby.  When we were pregnant with one, we bought a big 5 bedroom, 3 bath house that was half-built and we finished it.  I painted, stained, sanded, etc. every inch of that house myself while carrying a 11 pound, 2 ounce baby in my womb, breathing and ingesting every known fume to mankind while hanging precariously on a ladder.  Actually, it was a good situation, since my big belly hung perfectly between the rungs and acted as a sort-of counter balance.  I have worried about that child, however, and wondered if that’s why it took him so many years to learn to read. We eventually did find our land -- a serene 5 acre, rolling piece of heaven where we built a lovely farmhouse while living in a camper. I remember those difficult days and they seem like a dream. We sold out and moved to Villa Rica four and a half years ago, fulfilling our long-awaited wish of paying cash for a house. We're overhauling a big closet in our old Victorian right now, making it into a bathroom. It's taken us virtually years to get it done, but we're very close to finishing. It's taken us as long to outfit this bathroom as it used to take us to fix a whole house. But who's counting?