Chapter 12: Despair

Since I last wrote, I have bid on, and not gotten, several houses/town homes. Every time I hear the talking heads on TV tell me how bad the housing market is - how many houses are just sitting endlessly on the market waiting to be sold - I emit a short sharp bark of derisive laughter. If no one is buying a house, who are all these people outbidding me?? Riddle me THAT you walking hair spray ad!



Obviously, it's not going very well. I'm waiting to hear back from yet another bid to see if mine was more acceptable to the anonymous banker than some other faceless buyer. Every time my phone rings and it's my agent, my heart drops into my flip flops with a mixture of hope and no-hope. The whole thing is cold and impersonal. I never see or talk to the sellers, the listing agents or the bankers. I talk to my people, and they talk to their people, who talk to some other people, until eventually a calculator breaks my heart. And no one really seems to understand that this isn't some investment toward future wealth; this isn't some shrewd business deal - this is my house. My home. The few square yards of this planet connected physically and spiritually to myself. "Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever" -Ecc 1:4.



Inshallah.