The
Sow's EarThe
Sow's Ear
a parable in 7 pages
One: The Nest
September, 1989. After three years of marriage and a delayed honeymoon trip to New Zealand, we thought that we had finally grown up enough to at least act like mature, responsible citizens. To wit, we agreed we would do two things:
1) Cease birth control
2) Blow all our hard-won savings on a down payment for a house.
During the autumn,we looked at a variety of dilapidated farmhouses and raised ranches, all uninspiring, and made a failed offer on a place in Waterbury before suspending the search for the winter.
By February, 1990, Nancy was pregnant, but we still had no house. We made a last desperate trip to Norway in March, and by the time we got back, Nancy's maternal hormones were RAGING, and she needed a nest (not a rest, a NEST). She took to sitting on the egg-shaped, granite pothole stone she had retrieved from a river in the White Mountains a few years back, and she sewed a small flock of purple pterodactyls to stand in as surrogate children. Rick was fully complicit, having done some of the needlework on the pterodactyls himself.
The search became desperate. We looked at places that were within our budget, some just barely. We were determined not to get a raised ranch or an old farmhouse that would be a black hole for money. We saw a lot of both anyway, but stubbornly held our ground.
Finally Nancy stumbled on a modest classified ad in the Free Press. The price was...maybe too good to be true. We did a drive-by viewing then contacted the realtor for a look inside. It was very...well...FUNKY. Definitely not a raised ranch. Sure, it would need a little work (we told ourselves), but it was quite small so, say, reinsulating wouldn't cost near as much as in an old farmhouse.
But it was the WINDOW, seen here as it looked during the previous ownership, that won us over (or did us in, depending on how you look at it)-- a custom job patched together out of salvaged glass in the shape of a gigantic, stylized bigtooth aspen leaf. A natural fit for a couple of naturalists.
"Location, location, location," the realtor whispered into our receptive ears. Very woodsy, and across the road from the beautiful Lower Gorge of the Huntington River.
AND it came with a post-and-beam half-barn AND it was well within our means AND it was halfway between Burlington and Montpelier AND AND AND...
By early June, 1990, after a rousing round of lawyer's chicken on closing day (which Nancy has since concluded was more traumatic than giving birth), it was about 20% ours and 80% the bank's. And we moved in.
So here's our "only 360 more payments and it's ours!" shot:
