selling and buying

 Approximately a year after we got our septic tank replaced and Neighbour had inquired about our plans, we had decided we wanted to move on. Bill had grown tired of the oral history job—not the work itself, but the uses to which it was put. Both of us saw potential in bringing the kind of work he was doing to a wider audience. He was combining interviews with photos and scanned documents into a computer program that could be viewed like a website, but offline. The way these were structured at work was for the benefit mostly of researchers, which was valuable, but not how we would do it for people who wanted to document the life of their grandma, for example. We did a test project with the local quilt guild, which was fun for us and them and quite fascinating. They loved the end result, which was promising. We wanted to pursue this idea, but for various reasons, the university was an obstacle, particularly when it came to funding community projects. Also, I’d joined an online writing community and had gotten inquiries about being brought to local writing groups as a speaker, but the cost of my travel would have been prohibitive for them. We decided that staying would place us in a kind of a holding pattern. Since Daughter had graduated from high school and was moving away herself, everything seemed to point us in a new direction. 

We dithered about timing, but finally made a decision to call Neighbour on a particular weekend, since we’d promised to let them know when we were ready to sell. That Saturday, the phone rang. Imagine my shock when it was Neighbour asking us again about selling. I told him, ‘You won’t believe this, but we were planning to call you tomorrow!’ He went on to say that he was in Tennessee at his parents’ home. He wanted the house for them. They had no other family, were elderly, and had just gotten scammed. He’d been trying to get them to move to Fairbanks for years and they’d always refused—until that weekend. They were ready to head north. Neighbour said he and his wife would be over when they got back home later in the week. We sort of walked around in a daze, marvelling at how things were unfolding.

The neighbours came over to look around the house. I kept pointing out all the things that were wrong or would need work. He kept repeating, ‘This place has great chi.’ I laughed and commented that we were each taking on the wrong role. I was supposed to be gushing about how great the place was while he pointed out the many problems. He made an offer for a cash sale. We accepted it. That was that.

We started preparing for a major move, for ourselves and Daughter. Bill quit his job and they had a farewell party for us. I’m not sure why or how we decided we’d check out Down East Maine, but we booked a flight to Bangor and headed for Ellsworth. We talked to a realtor about what was available. It quickly became apparent that nothing there would suit, so we just enjoyed the rest of our trip and went back to Fairbanks. With about a week left until we had to vacate so remodelling could begin to make the house more comfortable for Neighbour’s elderly parents. We arrived home in the middle of the night and Daughter was flying out later that day. We got some of her boxes mailed off to her new address and then drove down to North Pole, a town 20 miles south of Fairbanks, to look at a cabin that was for sale. We’d picked up one of those real estate booklets that they had at the time and found it in there. It looked promising, so Bill called the realtor and set up an appointment for a viewing the next day. Later that evening, we drove our daughter to the airport and said a tearful good-bye. Then we went home and crawled into bed.

The next day, we viewed the cabin and said we wanted to buy it (it was another owner contract, so we didn’t have to deal with a bank). We went back to the realtor’s office and explained our situation, saying we’d need to move in the following week. He was surprised, but he said he thought he could make it happen. He did. So a week after we got back from Maine, a little disappointed but open to whatever was coming next, we moved into our new home. It was a holiday weekend and we’d rented a U-Haul. It broke down in front of the cabin. The office where Bill had rented it was closed early for the holiday, so he had to call the national number. A flatbed truck was sent to haul it away. Our truck was at the office, so Bill called someone to pick him up and bring him to the truck. I hauled some boxes until he got back, then we went back to Fairbanks for one more night, bringing the dogs and cats to their new home the following day. We were exhausted, but got settled into life in North Pole. When Neighbour’s parents moved in, they invited us to visit them. They were lovely people and we became friends, visiting them regularly. 

Bill got his old job back and we tried to decide what the next plan would be. One day at work, someone came in for something and mentioned that he’d gotten Irish citizenship because his grandparents were born in Ireland. Bill’s ears perked up and he started asking questions. When he got home, he looked into it further, saw that he qualified, and started gathering the required documents. I am writing this today in my home in rural Ireland partly as a result of us not going to Down East Maine, but going to North Pole instead, and Bill returning to his old job. And we weren’t done with Maine, yet, either, although that was almost a decade in the future. 

house to house

 When I got my acceptance letter from the PhD program at the university in Fairbanks, it was March. I still had a term to go in my MA program, a thesis to defend, and a job as a teaching assistant to complete. Our daughter was finishing her time in middle school. Bill was working graveyard shift. So we couldn’t move right away, but we could slowly start the transition.

One thing we had to do was sell our house. We had a small house on a corner double lot that had two large maple trees on the side and a couple of tall birch trees plus three large plum trees out front. It was a great little house, but it was dated (built around 1900) and would have had code issues. For example, it still had fuses instead of circuit breakers. When we bought it, it was an owner finance situation. We had a 10-year contract and had lived there for 7 years. It’s amazing to think we only paid $30,000 for it—people spend more than that on cars these days! During the time we lived there, the area was becoming desirable and we had regular cold calls from strangers asking if we would be interested in selling. 

Because we had a double lot, there was a bit of space between us and our next door neighbour. On the other side of his very small house was one that was like the others in the neighbourhood—two floors. The same people we bought from had owned all three houses. The neighbour (I’ll call him Grouchy) had bought his from them and the people on his other side were renting. We avoided Grouchy, but were friends with the people on his other side.  Grouchy used to complain about many things, both real and imagined. He once knocked on our door and yelled at me because he heard our dog barking when we locked him up in the garage. I informed him that we never put our dog in the garage and he sputtered that he heard a dog barking. Not my dog, dude. He complained to our friends that he could hear the kids when they went up and down the stairs and the water going through their pipes. Grouchy had some issues.

One day, he bumped into Bill outside. When Bill mentioned that we were going to move, Grouchy told him he was interested in buying our house on a contract and he was ready to talk about it when Bill was. When Bill said we weren’t in a position to do owner-financing, Grouchy got testy and told Bill to come back and talk to him when we couldn’t sell it any other way. 

Bill dealt with the selling of the house, because he was home during the day. He called a realtor and set up an appointment. The guy came and said that because of the code issues, he couldn’t sell it, but knew someone who would probably be interested. The guy came to look at it. He told Bill an involved story about how he wanted to buy the house for his daughter, who was newly remarried after an abusive relationship and he wanted to give her and his grandson a new start and blah, blah, blah. He gave us what we wanted for the house, paid us in cash in early May, and then let us stay there rent-free until the end of June. Because of the term times at my university, I would not be done with my final term until early June. Grouchy was disappointed.

Selling our house in the way we did made it easier to go to Fairbanks and find a place to live there, so in mid-May, we went there and talked to a realtor. When he heard our story, he said he thought he had the right place for us and brought us to a funky house three miles up the hill from the university. It was a round house on 3 acres in the woods. The owner wanted to do a contract. The terms of this were favourable, so we bought the house. Since this all happened on the first business day we were there, we still had most of the week to explore the area a little bit. It was exciting.

When we moved into the house, we found some slides showing the process of building it. It wasn’t a ‘regular’ house. The guy we bought it from had been a math teacher and this was a kind of experiment, we were told.  He had had a totem pole carved in Ketchikan and transported to Fairbanks, where it was painted then erected in a cleared area of the woods. The rest of the house was built around it. Metal girdles were strapped around the top and the bottom and then wooden beams places at specific intervals coming out from the totem pole. The house was round and the outside walls sloped inward from top to bottom. Inside there was a large living room/dining area/kitchen that took up a bit more than half of the circle, with the totem pole in the center. There were two bedrooms and a bathroom along the edge of the other semi-circle and a utility room in back. Outside, there was a porch that wrapped around part of the house, with doors on either side that led to arctic entries from which one could enter either the living room or kitchen. It was a fun house in a great location.

We did a bit of research and discovered that the totem pole was a replica of the Chief Johnson pole in southeast Alaska. It depicted the story of Fog Woman and Raven. In short, the story goes that Fog Woman knew how to call the salmon to her and Raven liked this, so cozied up to her. Eventually, they got married and Raven’s greed got the best of him. He started to berate her for not bringing enough salmon and once, in a rage, he hit her. She told him off and left. He chased her, but she slipped away, like fog, into the ocean. The salmon followed her and Raven was left to be lonely and hungry. Serves him right!

We were not yet done with Grouchy, though. Shortly after we moved in, we got a phone call from him

—pretty much the last person in the world I would have expected to her from. He complained about the guy who bought our house, saying that he had gotten permits to trim the beautiful plum trees and had ‘trimmed’ them down to stumps. He was fined and prevented from doing anything to the maple trees. Grouchy was threatening to sue. I told him to take it up with the person who now owned the property, since there was nothing I could do about it. He ranted for a while, told me I hadn’t heard the last of him, and hung up. I never heard from him again. 

Turns out the guy had lied to us about why he wanted to buy the house. His real plan was to knock down our house and build two houses on the double lot. I could see why Grouchy was upset. Now there would be two new tall houses on the lot, one of which would be right next to his bedroom window, not to mention all of the noise of construction. Still, it seemed a bit strange when he painted the word ‘CRY’ on the side of his wee house in protest. 

A few years later, we were in Portland on our way to a university further south, where we’d been invited to give presentations, and we decided to drive by and look at the houses that had been built. They were so ugly, with pale yellow aluminum siding and black shutters—they looked so out of place in that old neighborhood. I don’t know whether Grouchy still lived in the little house that was still there, dwarfed by the tall homes that surrounded it. It was kind of sad, but we had good memories of life in the house that used to be.

ready to go

our loaded U-haul truck  in Portland, Oregon ready to go.

People thought we were nuts.  My sister-in-law’s response upon learning that we were moving to Alaska was, “Why?”  “Why not,” my husband Bill replied.  Now that we were packed up and heading out, that “why not” attitude was stronger than ever.  And indeed, it did seem as though a force was helping us along beyond our control.  It felt right to be going to Alaska.  It was clearly what we were supposed to do.  Everything fell into place far too easily for us to think otherwise.

    We had sold our house in a matter of days to a guy who paid cash and agreed to let us stay in the house rent-free for a month and a half after the sale.  With the money from the sale of that house, we were able to take a trip to Fairbanks to look for a place to live.  We found a house within a couple of days.  The seller was willing to finance, so even though we had no jobs, we had a house, and we knew we could live off of the money from the sale of our Portland house until we had other income.

    When we got back to Portland, we needed to get a cap for the back of our truck so we could transport our animals.  A friend said her boyfriend had one he wanted to get rid of.  She called him and asked what kind of a truck it would fit.  “Ford Ranger,” he said.  In a daze, I made plans to bring the pizza and beer on an upcoming Friday night.  We had a nice visit while Bill and Randy put the cap on the back of our truck.  We had also brought some floor tiles that we had bought for our house but never used.  Randy was doing some home remodeling and they turned out to be just what he needed.  It was serendipity all around.

   Now one last task remained.  We had to find a way to get our stuff from Portland to Alaska.  Moving companies gave us an estimate of $7000!  Ouch!  We wouldn’t have much room in our truck because our three cats and 130-pound dog would take up that space.  We threw around the idea of renting a U-Haul, but I am a nervous driver and in any case, never learned to drive a stick shift, so there was no way I’d be able to drive our truck.  And frankly, the thought of sitting behind the wheel of a bigger truck terrified me—and probably Bill, too!  

    Once again, our dilemma was solved quickly and unexpectedly.  A friend came to visit and told us he’d been laid off work for the summer, but he was feeling OK about it.  Even though money would be tight, he’d get to spend the summer with his 11-year-old son.  “How would you like to take him on a trip to Alaska?” we asked.  His eyes grew wide as he asked if we were kidding.  “No,” we replied, “you can help with the driving and we’ll buy both of you a ticket to fly home from Alaska.  You can take your son on a cool trip and we can save several thousand dollars.  Everybody wins!”  The next day he called with the news that his ex-wife had given permission for the trip.  We were all set.

The text is written by Shari and the photos were taken by me.