In the last few days, I've been hanging lots of pictures, the old fashioned way -- with a hammer and nails, the occasional push pins, and, when I'm feeling really modern, some double-sided sticky foam. The ones I choose not to hang I slip into an odd assortment of frames, obsessing way too long about where to place them. Upstairs or downstairs? Hallway or bedroom? It doesn't matter, really, since the only people who will see any of them are real estate agents and their clients. I've been told that buyers don't want to see family pictures, or anything, for that matter, that might impede their ability to see a house as their own. Frankly, I don't give a damn. I got rid of the carpet full of dog pee. They're just going to have to use their imagination for the rest.
Funny that within a few weeks perfect strangers will be marching through my home and trying to avert their gazes as they come upon anything remotely personal, even though it might serve them well to know something about the kind of people who lived there. Yet hundreds of Facebook "friends," most of whom have little reason beyond simple voyeurism to get a glimpse of my personal world, will know within a few hours how and where and with whom we celebrated my daughter's birthday. I had hesitated to put it out there, but now that I've posted, I wait for the weighing in. The thumbs ups, the more detailed assessments, the curiosity. If a tree falls in a remote forest does it make a sound? If a celebration occurs and isn't posted on a Facebook wall, did it ever actually happen? If a seller removes all personal pictures from the walls of a house, does that mean nobody ever lived there?
The thing about the tree in the forest is that nobody ever really cared in the first place. The thing about the Facebook pictures is they disappear almost as quickly as they go up, pushed to the bottom of a never ending stream of "look at me, look at me" posts. As forgotten as that fallen tree. But the thing about the pictures hung the old fashioned way on the walls of a house is they don't disappear, and they are anything but silent. You can take them down all you want, put them in drawers, hide them deep inside cabinets, but they don't fade. They've been there for years without eliciting a single thumbs up from a stranger, but not even the most unimaginative buyer can pretend they're not there.
Caveat emptor. The pictures may be gone, but they still make a lot of noise.
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