Greetings, friends. (XIII)

Greetings, friends. It is late and I am tired. But the day still has yet to come when I am ready to take a day off from writing. I would like to plan it ahead of time rather than giving up because I was feeling too lazy or exhausted. 15 minutes or 750 words, that’s all I ask. It’s 11:40pm, so I still have time.

Today our realtor came to look at our mother’s house. Actually, she is not our realtor yet, but her agency has an office right up on the highway, not a mile from the house. In New Hampshire, you turn to your family first, and then your neighbors before anyone else. It is how things work here. The realtor was affiliated with Adah’s Girl Scout troop. Her daughter went to school with Adah. Of course we called her first. That’s what you do here.

So I shoveled out the driveway again, and then left to get my celebratory latte. The realtor arrived shortly after I got back.

The realtor was all sun and smiles, as you would expect, and very understanding. She took one look at the place and said we would be putting it on the market “as-seen, as-is” which is to say, it’s a fixer-upper, buddy. She recommended that Adah and I refrain from making capital investments prior to putting it on the market — just fix the things that need fixing, for safety’s sake, make the necessary disclosures, and let the future owners worry about, say, the water supply. Okay then.

She also said that the best time to sell a house in New England is the springtime. You can probably imagine why, based on my last entry. Another reason is that families like to move in the summer, between school semesters. Meaning they start looking after the first thaw.

I admired her optimism, and we are putting our trust in that. But putting the house on the market in early April means having all of Mom’s possessions disposed of, in one way or another, in the next two months. Which means spending a lot more time here in February and March than I originally had planned. I was going to have to spend that time here anyway. It’s just going to be more concentrated than I expected.

This all assumes the probate court gets off its butt before then.

Finally, the realtor said, offhandedly, “You said your mom had as many as 40 acres, but in my parcel search, I only found the one with the house, which is about 7 acres.” Say what now? We agreed that I would go to the town office and look for documentation on the property. She gave me a business card with her face on it, because she is a realtor, and left.

Well, I had to go to the town office anyway, and they have weird hours, so I left as soon as the plumber was done.

Oh, did I mention? There were multiple inches of standing water in the basement. Neither Adah nor I knew anything about it, so I called for a plumber yesterday, and one arrived just after the realtor left.

Long story short, he couldn’t tell where the water was coming from either, but he was able to get the sump pump working through the simple expediency of lifting the float bob with his finger. The standing water just wasn’t quite high enough to lift the float.

The plumber then showed me where someone in ages past had jury-rigged a lamp pull cord up and over a beam, so that you could pull the cord to activate the sump pump manually.

“Like this?” I asked innocently, pulling on the cord, and causing a gout of fetid water to squirt out of a crack in the pump hose, nearly splashing the plumber in the face. Fortunately, the man was a professional and had quick reflexes. The hose disappeared into a pipe sunk into the basement floor that led to who knows where. The brook out back, hopefully.

Anyway, I paid the man $200 plus tip for this guided tour of my mother’s basement, and then I left for the town office.

The town clerk very helpfully handed me a copy of the tax lien warning they had been planning to mail my mother at the end of the week, and then directed me to the next office over, where another very helpful clerk pulled the tax parcel data and the last two deeds on the property.

Sure enough, the tax parcel measures 6.89 acres. Equally surely, the boundaries are exactly where I expected them to be, having covered them on foot over the years. Fortunately, the property assessment was the expected value but for the correct acreage, so this all was a surprise but not actually a problematic one.

In summary, your correspondent wouldn’t know 40 acres if they bit him on the ass, and he is ostensibly a geographer. Well, I was wrong, but not in a way that mattered in the slightest. A narrowly averted cadastral disaster. I still wonder where I got the 40 acre figure from.

And that was just what I did before lunch, before my mother’s webmaster came over and wanted to talk about what we were going to do with her website and her unpublished research, before I discovered that it wasn't my phone that was refusing to charge after all, but the cable I had it plugged into, and before I worked a full day’s work.

Man, I’m tired. And it’s after midnight, so technically this journal entry is late. If you’re reading this, I send you my love. Ceterum censeo pro vigilum imperdiet cessandam est, and, to everyone else, I bid you good night.