It's History Now

On the Saturday of Labor Day Weekend, 2003, EEFFH told me he wanted to "be alone". That weekend was exactly four years from the date I received his very first e-mail—an interesting choice of days to break up with me.

His pronouncement took me by surprise and knocked me off my feet, emotionally. It took me three weeks to get my act together. I had to go through every cupboard, closet and bookshelf in the house to extricate my possessions. I had to find a place to live, apply for a mortgage, open bank accounts, and pack belongings. And keep going with my normal schedule, which included babysitting two-year-old Boston three or more times a week and taking pottery classes at the community college twice a week.

Thanks to my wonderful realtors, Bill and Tom, I found a house the first day I looked. It was the 15th house I looked at on the day before Labor Day. It was a Pulte home, well built and well designed. And it was only one mile away from Tyler and Jaci who, along with the children, were to be my narrow ribbon connecting me to sanity for the next couple of years.

Lots of sleepovers and lots of creativity took place in that house, but I always missed being closer to town. In the almost-three years I lived in that house, I only had friends over about three times, as I didn't want to force friends to drive 45 minutes to see me. So when my friends Eileen and Jacki decided to sell their house in town, I jumped at the chance to buy it.

The best tenants in the world, Shane and Amanda, moved into my vacant house and treated it with loving care for the next two years. Now they've gone on to Shane's "I've got a new MBA" job at Hewlett-Packard in Colorado.

Tomorrow Karl and Kathy will take possession of 7532 W Colony Park Drive. I hope they appreciate how lovingly that house has been cared for over the past five years. And I hope they have many wonderful years there.

I had to part with a lotta lotta money today. I tried to get Countrywide to help me out with the enormous loss on this sale, but it turns out that if you're good about making your mortgage payments, even if it's a terrific hardship for you, the mortgage companies aren't willing to help you. If I hadn't made my payments, they would have been willing to help me. But because I made all my payments, I was privileged to hand over in excess of twenty-five thousand dollars to the title company today.

I've felt horrible about the situation for the past several weeks. But today, once I handed the signed and notarized papers over to the FedEx guy and determined the money had been wired out of my account, I felt tremendous relief.

Repeat after me: It's only money.

One down. One to go.