Moving Thoughts

Ha,ha. Not that I expect anything I write just now will be moving. No, tonight it's just thoughts on the subject of moving. Maybe the first of a series. Time will tell.

This is our first time to both sell and buy a house. We've moved before, more than once. But it was from house to house (to house, to house....) the first three months of our marriage, visiting friends and family as guests. Then it was the big move across the ocean, to live in Zagreb for two years in a rented house, then moving from there to the house we shared with Drazen's parents.

Then we crossed back over the ocean to live in a little bitty (for America) apartment at the graduate school, and after three years moved into a larger apartment on campus.

Then we bought the house we live in. So it's the first house we ever bought, and we bought it from its owners. We met them from the get-go, and we wound up meeting their friends and being introduced to many of our neighbors through them, so that we quickly felt at home.

The whole thing of going through real estate agents has been a new experience. And rather strange for me, since before we just talked directly to the owners of the house.

As it is now, we haven't even met the people whose house we will be buying. And had I not happened to come home when I did the first time our potential buyer looked at our house (thinking he would have already left), I would not have met him. It's all done via the agents. Whenever we've gone to look at other houses, no one is home, which to me feels very strange.

And so I find it interesting, given this indirect, impersonal way of looking for and checking out houses, that the following has transpired.

On that day I happened to come home while our looker was finishing up his looking, the first thing he said to me was, "You guys have the greatest books!" (I hear the conventional wisdom is that houses with lots of books don't attract buyers.) It turns out he is working on a Masters in English literature, so of course he noticed all the literature and other interesting stuff that lines our shelves.

Not only that, but as we talked a bit and he learned that Drazen works at a particular neurosurgery clinic, I learned that he is related to one of the founding surgeons.

Pretty cool, is it not? But that's not all.

Curious about the owners of the house we are set to buy, and with Google at our disposal, I looked them up. It turns out that she is a therapist. I don't know her, but I recognized her name because a friend of mine once shared office space with her.

And when we were looking at their house a third time, pretty much set on making an offer, I couldn't help but notice an awful lot of American and English literature on their bookshelves.

So, I'm wondering if we may have three people in a row with English degrees buying and selling houses to each other. And two of us therapists, and then the connection with Drazen's job. Who would have thought it could happen with real estate agents in the mix the whole way and no personal connections among the sellers/buyers? I know stranger things have happened, but I find it rather unusual in a very cool way.

And it certainly makes it easier for me to leave our house, knowing we're leaving it in the hands of someone whose first words were, "You guys have the greatest books!"