Housing Crises

Cute little houses dance like sugar plum fairies in my head. I pass them everywhere, gaze through their opaque exteriors and imagine the welcoming and carefully appointed rooms inside. Miniature homes that look as if they could fit inside my family room. I want to rent one, just borrow it until I figure out what I really want to do, where I really want to live. The  sugar plum houses dancing in my head are cozy, neat, and eminently affordable.

When I told my daughter about all the wonderful little houses out there, she reminded me they were all probably occupied. That had not even occurred to me; in my gently swaying fantasies, the little houses are all there for the taking, just begging to be squatted in by a soon to be homeless woman, her daughter, and their blind dog.  We are friendly, warm, and chatty. We can turn the world on with our smiles -- especially after two days in Nashville, where we learned some solid life lessons about how to treat people right.

We northerners might think there is no such thing as a free lunch, but for two blissful days in a row in Nashville, there was definitely such a thing as a free cup of coffee.  Yesterday, the lady at the desk in our hotel actually snapped at me as I approached with the coffee I had managed to snag before the coffee bar actually opened. "You're not going to try to pay me for that are you?" She was all smiles. I cannot remember the last time a human smiled at me at six thirty on a Sunday morning.

I returned from Nashville with a renewed sense of optimism about the capacity of folks everywhere to pay it forward. Somebody gave me two free cups of coffee, so I left the waitress at our next meal a huge tip.  Folks held doors open for me, smiled at me for no apparent reason at all, and so I did the same for the next guy. I am allowing a family I've never even met to move into my house, a house that was still being unwrapped as my own family moved in nineteen years ago, and I am letting them do so within a very short period of time. Have I no right to expect that someone else will do the same for me and my shrinking brood? I will smile my biggest smile; I will buy them a cup of coffee. Two, even. Fair's fair. It's my turn, I think, to be on the receiving end of a not so random act of kindness.

I suppose my expectations can sometimes be a bit high. Note to self: aim low, you don't get disappointed. That's how it was when we went to Nashville this past weekend. To say we had planned our visit would be a bit of an overstatement; a day in advance, we rented a car, and soon after that I remembered to book a hotel room. We noticed after it was too late to change things that there would be no official campus tours during our brief stay, no opportunities for us to kiss ass in the admissions office and get points on my daughter's application for showing interest. Our bucket list was short: see Vanderbilt, and sit in a bar listening to live country music. Check, check. We achieved our goals, though we were aiming about as low as we could.

To say we exceeded expectations would be a gross understatement. A young man we had never met -- a friend of a friend's son -- gave us an in depth tour, complete with legendary college tales and advice on application strategies. I got free coffee -- twice. I got the softest and coolest pair of cowboy boots I've ever seen, in a store permeated by the most intoxicating leather aroma I have ever sniffed. We got free breakfast because our bathtub drain malfunctioned. We dined on an out of this world dessert of chocolate chip cookie dough egg rolls. And I enjoyed two free morning coffees. My bucket list, rather empty to start with, runneth over with some simple pleasures everyone should manage to enjoy before they die. 

Life is good, or at least so I thought after a weekend filled with pleasant surprises. Back north, I went to pick up the dog at the dog sitter's house, and explained to her that there was a contract on my house and I would probably have to pack up, dispose of a lot more accumulated junk, all within a few weeks. My dog sitter, a person well accustomed to insanity, looked at me as if I was nuts.  She remarked at how odd it seemed that I wasn't worried, that I must be extremely confident or have great faith in some higher power. I thought about that for a second; amusing, largely because I have no basis for either. I suggested to her that I was merely brain dead. She agreed that seemed plausible. Whatever the case, it still beats worrying.

I am worrying, but not so much about finding a cute little sugar plum fairy house as finding one that isn't decorated in twenty-first century nondescript. I'd rather pitch a tent in a friend's backyard (okay, not in winter, but you get the point) than live in a place with wall to wall off-white carpeting, wall after wall of builder's white paint, and predictable patches of standard issue parquet floors. I need to somehow bring with me my mismatched furniture, my bright colored walls, my complete lack of any sense of interior decor.

My sugar plum house may be cozy and neat, but it needs to be dancing to its own drummer.