Just as our giant complex wheels of financing began to turn, we were crushed to discover she took a weekender’s cash offer. Didn’t even call us. Tears in our eyes. How could she lie with a pie?
Two more years we spent crumpled in our little place, climbing into the realtor’s red Audi at a moment’s notice, wincing at houses peculiar, claustrophobic or badly sited, wrong for all kinds of reasons.
One day our realtor called. “I have a house to show you. I warn you, it’s revolting.”
“Great, Matt. Always interested in seeing a revolting house.”
We were first to see it on its first day on the market.
We still laugh at shelter magazines and their guides to selling your home: Plant a few flowers. Scrub down your house. Paint it white, I read. Whenever we showed our house, I baked cinnamon bread.
This house smelled like ten cats and ten-year-old litter. A patina of filth filmed the walls and the scummy shag rugs. A child-sized turd perched in a bathtub. Still, scruffy-stuccoed, scraggled, we knew at once it was the house for us.
Sunlight wept in relief through the row of French doors. The carved bird above the fireplace, paralyzed in paint, had not fully lost her voice. Peeling walls and wires and the mucky littered basement did not dim this building’s native grace. Meadows opened like peripheral vision, taking in wild turkeys, redtail hawks, the rising moon, the sound of church bells. I felt like Vita finding Sissinghurst.
Early the next morning, I rummaged through my little studio. How to claim this house? I found a tiny cube of Japanese stick ink. Ink. Perfect symbol for two writers. I tied a narrow slate blue ribbon round it, slipped the midget gift into my pocket.
We met the realtor at the house at noon. Away from his eyes, I palmed my inky charm, slid it to the back of an attic closet shelf, claimed the house in full belief. Happy hearts pounding, we put in our bid.
Two days later, we got the call. Our bid had been accepted.
Click of heels and clink of glasses! Gosh, that charm worked fast! But next day, a call from our accountant drew our celebration to a screeching halt.
“You could squeak on through, but I think you really want to sell your house before you buy this one. Just to keep things comfortable.”
Shoot. We thought we had a hold of the house that had a hold on us. It felt so much like ours. Tail between our legs, we made the call, withdrew the offer.
Back on the market it went. We had to sell and couldn’t speed the process. Months went by. No matter how many bouquets I set out or loaves I sugared, we couldn’t charm a couple into buying.
But every so often, and on every major holiday, we found our way to the lane of our hopeful house, as close as we could get without trespassing. We stretched and bent to glimpse it through the tangled hedgerows, peering through the prickly barberry at the grounds, the house itself transfixed by a woebegone, cobwebby, sleeping-beauty charm, cast by the troubled family who owned it.
Inspired, perhaps, by the Top Hat, The Scottie, The Roadster—charms of the real estate board game—each time we visited, we brought a little thing to bury, to remind the house of us. A little ring. A jigsaw puzzle piece. A couple bulbs of daffodil, one to plant near the catalpa, one on the wild hillside. Other trinkets, now forgotten.
The stick ink stayed planted deep in the house. Give off rays, Ink. Give off roots. Keep anyone from buying this but us.
An entire year went by. At last, the people destined for our farmhouse found it. The day their financing came through, we made the breathless call.
“Is it still available?”
“They’ve shown it for a year and no one else has made an offer. They’ve slashed the price a third. It’s yours.”
Wheee!
Was it the charms that did it? Yes and no. Charms are outward nuggets of intention. Emblems of focus, channels of desire. The power to create or attract what we want is not in the objects, but in the verbs, like desiring and intending and believing. But I do love the cozy little nouns, those playful symbols that make hope physical.
The story could have ended there, but doesn’t.
After fifteen years of working on the house, freeing it from its sour spell detail by detail, the inner camera pulls back to reveal the house as a larger charm on a bigger board, another Monopoly piece.
For if a charm helps you manifest a needy house, the next thing you want to do is manifest good people to work on it. Then you want to create the best working situation for them and encourage their creativity. You want more than a lovely place to live. You want to be the kind of person you’d want to work with. The person you aspire to be. That’s a big game board, and fun. And you’re not the only one playing.
The bigger charm channels not just our hopes, but those of the gifted artists, designers, builders, gardeners, stoneworkers, keepers who hold and fulfill their own visions for the house, for themselves as creators and us as cocreators.
Like our cube of ink, a house, or a job, or a school, or an art form is not an end, but a means. A means of expanding and expressing feelings and aspirations for ourselves, for one another and for beloved physicality. Which is charmed, I’m sure.
Imagine a way in rather than out.
When we were creating our kitchen, the question of tiling in the back of the stove arose. Bulging cornucopias and della Robbia opulences and painted little Quimper figures are available for such kitchen landscapes. Since the shelf-life of tile is nearly eternal, we pored over choices. I finally realized no matter what we installed, after years of standing and stirring, I would tire of looking at it.
But what if we could renew the view? I proposed a niche, for a shifting display of art. So, as the saying goes, we made a niche for ourselves.
It’s just a little tiled seven by nine inch opening cut into the back-splash, off-center. Ironically, art rarely shows up there. It belongs to flowers, which I change almost as often as the menu.
In a world where we’re told to carve our own niches, or find our niche market, we’re often advised to keep doing the same thing to fill that niche. But why display the same inert behavioral cornucopia? The ultimate nature of niches is space for a change.
In a dusty, dim antique shop in a semi-shuttered upstate town, a jutting corner of red caught my eye. I slid out the stained wooden sign from behind the eyesore table lamp. “YAD-OT.” It pleased me immensely instantly, this smooth, hand-crafted piece, even before I got what it said. And then it pleased me even more.
The old salt at the desk told me it dates from the ‘20s or ‘30s. He got it from a printshop on Varick in Manhattan which created signs for movie theatres. Indeed, there was another sign that said “yadrutaS stratS” but this was the one for me. After all, how often is its subject advertised?
The other day, our handyman hung it in the kitchen above our pantry door, where we can see it daily. But later, when I shut the door with some vigor, the sign jumped off the wall, narrowly missing my head. “A fitting end,” I thought with a smile.
Yet I have been granted another and yet another “YAD-OT,” and I am full of gratitude for the gifts each brings. The sign dove off the wall so I would remember to share it with you. (It now hangs securely