Moving On

Those are pine trees in front of the house.
Pine trees have pine needles. 

If you had nothing better to do yesterday, and you happened to be in the county seat of St. Clare County, Alabama, you could have sauntered to the courthouse steps around noon and bid on our now former home in Moody. You probably would have gotten a phenomenal deal on it.

This is part of the process of closing down our accidental business. The process is ugly and it isn't following the happy, clear and concise plan we had scheduled to close down our business when we carefully mapped out our business plan back in 2003. But as my friend Freedom once said (and she may have quoted it from someone else, but I always attributed it to her), "No battle plan outlives the enemy." I am numb to the entire ordeal now, but I write this blog anyway.

The house has three bedrooms and one bathroom. It is maybe 1,100 square feet. Unlike the other three bedroom, one bathroom home we had (now Mr. Ex-Partner has), I always had this place rented and for top dollar. Sometimes with horrible tenants (Mr. Smith and Ms. Kathy) and sometimes with really awesome tenants. If I had kept this one, I would have replaced the bedroom carpets. That's about the worst part of the home, and even the icky carpets didn't keep people from wanting this place, though I don't know why.

My favorite story about this house is once, in one of the rare occasions when it was vacant, I had two applicants on the house. One--who thought for sure she was negotiating from a position of strength--told me the only way she was ready to immediately rent the place was that I was supposed to stop what I was doing, flew directly to Moody and swept off the pine needles that had conglomerated on the roof in the past week. It struck me as an odd request, and obviously the story stuck with me. It wasn't like the Earth's gravitational pull would cease if she moved in. Pine needles were going to fall on the roof again.

I told her I would not remove the pine needles. She could either wait for the next stiff wind to blow them away and take the house or move on. What she didn't know was I had moved on to the next tenant.

And now I am moving on again.