If you subscribe online to The New York Times you receive advance copies of features that will appear in the Sunday edition of the printed newspaper. So it was Friday morning that I read what I presume will be the lead article of the real estate section: “When Your Home Has a History” (https://nyti.ms/2t7pbIR).
It was an interesting story about past occupants of apartments and houses and how such provenance might affect the sale or enjoyment of domiciles beyond their intrinsic value. As the article related, occupants do not always know the secrets of their homes before taking possession of the premises.
So it was for Gilda and me when we moved into our home almost 33 years ago. Oh, we knew who the sellers were, though we never met them, not even at the closing. They were represented at the closing by a court appointed lawyer picked to oversee distribution of any joint assets. You see, they were in the middle of a rather bitter divorce.
Neither lived in the house when Gilda looked at it with our real estate agent while I was at work one day in early March. Living there were two dogs, one large, one small. The small one was the feistier. The dogs had the run of the house. You can imagine what we found on the seven rooms of wall to wall carpet when we finally moved in two months later.
Gilda knew this was the house we should buy by a convergence of numerical coincidences: She saw the house on March 11. The house number was 11. Our birthdays are 11 days apart. We were married 11 years at the time. We were married in the 11th month of the Jewish calendar. On the first night as a married couple in our first home in Connecticut, when we looked at our digital clock, it was 11:11.
We didn’t think about the previous owners other than to relate to friends how they must have really disliked each other not to reach a divorce settlement for nearly a year. The price of the house had been set by the court the prior August. It didn’t go onto the market until the following March 11. Though home prices had escalated since August, the price of their home remained firmly set in the past. Our gain, their loss.
And so it was for the first 10 years of living in our current home. Then, as I was fiddling around with the insulation in the rafters of our basement one day, an envelope fell to the ground.
In it was a love letter. A love letter from him to her. I invaded their privacy. I read the letter. Wouldn’t you?
I don’t remember any of it specific language. Though I saved the letter for several years, I eventually discarded it, much the same way he, or she, discarded their once-loving union.
I hadn’t thought about that note for the better part of a decade until this morning as I read The Times while torrential rain, then some snow showers followed by strong gusts of wind assaulted our homestead, overturning a Weber grill on the patio, knocking down part of a fence and leaving a large lake with wind-blown ripples in our back yard.
Our home indeed had a history, but not as memorable and meaningful as the one we have lived for more than three decades and who knows how many more.
