Buying a House Sight Unseen
IT’S TRUE.
Three weeks after visiting Ashland, Tony and I made an offer on a house, sight unseen. After returning to BrookIyn at the end of August, I scoured Ashland real estate online (thanks to trulia.com) and sized up everything in our price range. Virtual reality led the way. I went on dozens of video house tours and traveled the town on Google Maps, clicking the arrows on “street view” to check out each neighborhood. My friend Kathy was our eyes on the ground.
Our house-to-be appeared on Day 18 of my Trulia Pursuit: three bedrooms, two baths, 1,700 square feet, one story, built in 1987, a two-car garage. Its charms, though, lay outside: hiking trails a block away, a huge green meadow in back, a fish pond with a waterfall in front, majestic trees—redwood, birch and blue spruce—standing sentinel.
Aware that desirable properties in Ashland went quickly, Tony and I secured a realtor, who turned out to be a treasure, and we made an offer a few days later. It was accepted. During the next two weeks, Tony and I took turns flying to Ashland to make sure our decision was not misbegotten. Tony excels at anticipating the worst and I lean towards Pollyanna.
“What’s this about?!” our Brooklyn son, Carl, said when we told him the news. “You do know Oregon is on the other side of the country.” If we were determined to move, he argued, why not buy a house in Northampton, Massachusetts where another best friend, Martha, lived. I would keep my 60 years of New England ties and live within driving distance.
When I told Martha, who had moved from Seattle to Northampton three years earlier (to help with her new grandson), she said: “Sounds wild, but I understand.”
Most friends—and family—admired our pluck but thought we had lost our minds.
Only two and a half years earlier, we had moved just as precipitously from Rhode Island, where we had lived for 40 years, to Brooklyn. After college, Carl, our older son, had headed to East Africa to work with local coffee farmers. He stayed for eight years. When he announced that he and his new Ethiopian wife Kidist were moving to New York City, we cheered. When their baby Lucas soon followed, and our younger son, Dan, accepted a post doc in statistics at NYU, we packed our bags. Within two months we put our house in Rhode Island up for sale, gave away practically everything we owned, and rented a three room, fourth-floor walkup in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, four subway stops from Carl’s apartment.
This time, too, our friends thought we were crazy—and we were. Crazy about our grandchild and hanging out with our boys and their significant others. Crazy about the museums, the theater, the food, and the mindboggling diversity that make New York City spectacular.
But there was also a lot of bad crazy, from carrying groceries up four flights of stairs to the constant din of construction. Topping my husband’s list was spending 45 minutes looking for parking within walking distance of our apartment, then trying to remember a few days later where you’d parked, then making way for the weekly street sweepers who sentenced you to hunting for a spot again.
In our heads, Tony and I planned to give Brooklyn three years and then plot our next move, although we knew wrenching ourselves from Lucas and his parents would be heartbreaking. When our younger son, Dan, decided to leave his post doc at NYU and join the LA Dodgers as a sports analyst, Tony and I offered to drive his car across country to him and his Israeli wife Einor, a fresh Chinese art historian. That was August 2017.
We celebrated our cross-country journey with a sunset drink at Santa Monica Pier. After falling in love with California during the six years I lived there as a teenager—and the forty years of visits to my parents’ house on the Westside of Los Angeles that followed—I wondered whether LA might become home again. But I couldn’t help comparing the quieter LA of 1965 to today’s LA on steroids, where traffic jams and so much more shattered the innocence.
The decision to fly from LA to Ashland to visit my high school buddy, Kathy, was spontaneous. Although we’d kept in touch by mail for five decades, since she headed to Stanford and stayed in the west and I moved east, we had seen each other only a few times. When she opened the door at her condo in Ashland’s “railroad district,” we laughed at how our clothing matched after all these years. Same Teva sandals and black pants, similar shirts, and soon the same hats.
As Kathy ushered us around the next three days, through smoke from a massive forest fire nearby and record-breaking heat, the town’s charm was unshakeable. We saw Julius Caesar at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, listened to a cellist in luscious Lithia Park, enjoyed takeout at the Ashland Food Coop, admired historic houses on quiet streets where deer roamed free, and sampled local honey at the growers’ market. We escaped the smoke on a hike through wild flowers on 7,500 foot Mt. Ashland.
For me, the West has always been holy wine and Ashland was no exception. For Tony, who had immigrated from Italy to Queens when he was 13, it was a new frontier.
As I said, within three weeks after returning to Brooklyn, we found a house that caught our eyes and hearts.
At the end of March, we took everything we could fit in four suitcases along with our two cats, hugged our Brooklyn family tight, and boarded a plane for Oregon. Our new life, we swore, would be bicoastal. “You have to learn how to pronounce it,” three-and-a-half-year-old Lucas told me. “It’s not Or-e-gone. It’s Ora-gun. Now say Brook-lyn.”
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