I am not going to spend time talking about my background. If you continue to read on, you will figure it all out. Writing is supposed to be cathartic so I am hoping this comes true for me.
This has been an insane month. The number of mammoth changes in my life are hard for me to grasp. My stomach is permanently clenched in concern and events outside are just running roughshod over me. And it all started with the biggest 10 minute mistake in my life.
Several months ago, my wife’s friend and I had an event. That is all I am really going to call it. I was lonely and drunk and she came on to me. It didn’t get too far, lasted no more than 10 minutes and once I realized what I was doing, I sent her home. Eventually she told my wife before I did. Her story was full of lies and exaggerations but there it was for everyone to see. The funny thing is, earlier that day I had resigned myself to telling my wife after Christmas, which was about 2 weeks away. The idea of keeping it from her was eating me up. It sounds trite, but the Jerry McGuire movie line always popped into my head, “It isn’t real until I tell you.” Stupid I know, but there it is.
It was obviously ugly. Her husband was mad at me, my wife was furious and hurt and I was racked with regret and remorse. It was such a dumb thing to do it is hard now to imagine how I could have been that stupid. Anyway, that led to us deciding to move from our dream home. That wasn’t a big deal. The year before we had considered moving downtown and had looked at several places before we decided the prices were just too high. Our neighborhood was awful. It was full of crazy people using hair dryers as pretend speed radar guns, a lady who rebuked people who put up Christmas Lights as “doing the work of the devil”, so called friends who stopped talking to us because we put up a fence, and gossipers like I have never seen. Petty, small minded people and not at all the people we would normally associate with if given half a chance. So selling our home wasn’t a major shock. What was a shock, was what transpired later.
I don’t remember the exact dates, so I will just start at the beginning. We decided to put our house up for sale without knowing where we were going. Our agent explained that our neighborhood was a slow moving one and the average sale took 10 months. So we put it up for sale and got ready to hunker down. It sold two days later.
Covid-19 at this time was a secondary news item. It was ravaging China and there were talks it might finally come to America. But it was still secondary news. We didn’t pay it much mind.
Suddenly we were in a bit of a bind. We had to find a new home rather quickly, much quicker than we had planned. The purchasers wanted to move in in five weeks. They were paying cash so it could be a quick process. We began by looking in a place called Nocatee. Younger area, nice amenities and more our lifestyle. Unfortunately everything was zero lot lines. For those of you not familiar with that, those are homes that are smashed up against each other. Generally the homes are five to ten feet apart. You’ve seen them and there is a good chance you live in one. For the past twenty years we had enjoyed one-half acre lots and thirty to forty feet between homes. Plus we had two large labs who loved to run. So the zero lot lines for us was a big negative. In addition, the homes were about twenty-five percent more expensive than the home we just sold. Also, most of the nicer subdivisions had something called a “Community Development District” which added another two to three hundred dollars a month to your monthly housing payment. If you haven’t heard of the term, just search for “CDD”. It is big in Florida.
We also started looking in a place called Julington Creek. Again another younger more populace place, but housing costs were high there as well. I couldn’t stomach paying upwards of a half-million dollars for an average upscale home. It made me sick.
So we started talking about moving back to Atlanta. We had lived in a little community named Cumming for about twenty years before we decided to move back to Florida. Most our friends were still there, the homes were more reasonably priced and we new the area. The thing is, I didn’t want to move back. I love Florida and being a native, I am used to the heat and humidity. It would also mean my wife would have to quit her job.
I work remote for my company, so I can live anywhere. I have been working remote for about ten years. My wife goes to an office as she is in accounting and has to deal with checks and mail. So would it make sense for her to quit so we could move? It was a topic of discussion quite often. We continued to look locally but I have to admit I was getting discouraged. While we lived on a half-acre, most the homes we looked at were one-quarter to one-fifth an acre. We new that up in Cumming Georgia we could get land and a nice home in our price range. We talked a lot about our options. Five days after we agreed to sell our house, my company announced what they called a “Voluntary Separation Policy” for people over fifty years of age. Apparently us half-centurions we’re not as appealing as younger people. I am in that lot of people. This was a shock and for me, raised nervousness quite a bit. They would make their decisions in the next two months.
Now things got a little more intense. Buying a more expensive home in Florida made almost no sense. My wife, while she has a good job, can’t support us alone. My job, because of its technical nature isn’t in high demand in Florida, or at least the area where we lived. Atlanta though had many more companies who hired people like me. So moving to Atlanta made much more sense. Only thing was, we were down to about three weeks before our house closed and we needed a place to live. I was also worried about my future. Being homeless was a definite possibility. Now Covid-19 was in the news every day. It had spread to America and things were starting to change quickly. What to do. What to do?
As a backup, we started looking for apartments in case we didn’t find a home. It was a struggle as well since most places don’t like one-hundred pound dogs and we had two of them. We finally found a place and locked in an apartment in Jacksonville. This was just a back-up. My wife could keep her job, we could move our stuff into storage like we did when we first moved down to Florida and we could consider our options.
During this time, we also started making trips to Atlanta to look for homes. During the month long era, I traveled six hours each way for three of the four weekends. Sleep and rest weren’t an option. We went back to work each Monday completely exhausted from the weekend of house hunting and driving. During the week, we’d look in Florida for homes in the evening, and on the weekends, I packed up and headed back to Atlanta. All the time worrying about my future at a company where I have worked for fifteen years. All the time feeling sick about the ten minutes of screw-up on my part that had really pushed us to this point. In my spare moments I started sending out my resume to everyone. I figured I better cover my bases.
On the plus side, stress and worry can help with weight loss. I dropped almost fifteen pounds in a month.
On my third trip to Atlanta, our agent and me (my wife didn’t go as she was dealing with all the packing and moving plans), looked at all the homes I could find on-line. They were all turds. While she was driving me back to my friends house where I was staying, she suggested we look at another home that had just come on the market. Since it was on the way, and only about two miles from his house, we decided to stop in and take a look. It was the first home I said, “Yes, I could see us living here.”. It wasn’t perfect, I wanted a basement, it didn’t have one, but it was at least in the realm of what we were looking for in a house.
