Over Spring Break, Barbara, Maddy and I took a break from the perennial, apparently futile chore of trying to sell our house and went on vacation to the Dominican Republic.
Our realtor persuaded us to get the house cleaned before we left–a nightmare involving many, many hours of cleaning, trips to the dump, painting, woodwork, and regrouting the tub surround—so she could use our entire vacation as a kind of extended open house.
Without our knowledge, Maddy decided to do her bit to help us sell the house. When we got back from the Dominican Republic, she took me over to the old manual typewriter I got her for her birthday, which she had left prominently displayed on a side table, and showed me a folded piece of paper propped on the roller.
“This was my message for the people who came to look at our house,” she said, looking very pleased with herself. “It’s the pros and cons.”
I opened the piece of paper. It was folded vertically in half, with a line drawn down along the fold, and there was a paragraph of typing on each half, showing certain signs of Maddy’s struggle against the low-tech challenges of her old Royal machine.
One column read THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULD BUY OUR HOUSE; the other read THIS IS WHY YOU SHOULDN’T BUY OUR HOUSE.
The pros went like this:
“Welcome to 206 Chapin Road! It’s a really nice house–very cozy and sweet. It’s perfect for a family of 2 or 3. The view from the porch is very pretty in winter, summer, spring, and aummn. This house also has very cool floors. I’d reccamend this house to a family with children so the child can have the room with the loft bed and slide and also lime green carpeting. Upstairs there is mainly hard wood floors. In the back of the house there is a pretty little man made pond that is lovely in the spring if you plant flowers around it. I remeber once counting at least 6 frogs at one time in that pond.”
The cons paragraph was considerably less encouraging:
“This house is absolutely freezing in the winter. When it rains really heavily huge trenches erode away from the houses steep driveway. Speaking of our driveway, in winter it turns into a giant sheet of ice. If you have allergies or something like that to pollin or ragweed or golden rod then you’ll have series trouble breathing around the beginnin of summer. The kitchen cabnets and the space above them gets really dusty. The shower is pretty disgusting too.”
My heart did a peculiar two-way acrobatic. On one hand, I was incredibly impressed at her ethical even-handedness; on the other hand, if anyone read her helpful analysis, surely we’d never sell the house. But which was more important—selling the house, or having a daughter who was a beacon of honesty?
I was still trying to come to grips with this moral conundrum when the phone rang. It was our realtor.
“Good news,” she said. “You’ve got an offer.”
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4 users responded in this post
Oh wow! So, did it turn out that the people who bought the house had seen the Pros/Cons sheet?
Woops – forgot to rate this. 3, because it leaves you guessing.
3 – it is a great piece, and yeah, I wanna know if the buyers had seen and read Maddy’s sheet. This should go near the other essay about her writing and her typewriter. They don’t have to be adjacent, but at least near each other.
3. I like the child’s honesty, the end, the cat … (Need more cat stories)
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