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REFLECTIONS
eBay for shoes. I wanted a small piece
of this place to call my own.
So every night I’d log on to mls.ca
with these simple criteria: Prince
Edward Island, $25,000 to $75,000
price range, one bedroom or more.
Unlike their euphemism-spouting
American counterparts, Canadian real-estate agents pull no punches when it
comes to property descriptions: “House
has been neglected—needs a strong
arm.” Or: “Small country home left
vacant for five years. Needs major
cleanup.” Or: “No source of heat. Property had a woodstove that previous
owner took.” Such phrases scared the
bejesus out of Dan, so I stopped showing him the listings. But I had a strong
stomach and devoured all of them.
That’s why, on this particular night, I
knew I’d hit the jackpot. The photos
showed a little red house with a dormer
that sat on an acre of land with a “
distant water view.” That probably meant
you could see the bay if you climbed
onto the roof, but I was betting you
could smell salt water from the porch.
“Honey, you have to look at this one,”
I pleaded.
“I’m asleep,” Dan said.
“You are not. This house is perfect—
we should buy it.”
“With what money?” Dan muttered.
“It’s just a little house,” I said. “It
costs less than a lot of new cars.”
“That’s why we don’t own a new car,”
he said. “The house isn’t going anywhere. I’ll look at it in the morning.”
I clicked on “print.” When the pages
emerged I carried them to the bed.
“God, you’re a pest,” Dan said, but he
sat up and put on his glasses.
“I really need your opinion,” I said.
“Yeah, okay,” he said after studying
the listing sheet. “It’s a cute house.”
That was all I needed to hear. I
picked up the telephone.
“What are you doing?” Dan asked.
“Calling the real-estate agent,” I said.
That’s my son
(right) and
a friend taking
a stroll on
Cabot Beach
“You do know,” the real-estate agent
said, not unkindly, “that most people
look at a house before buying it?”
“It’s 11 o’clock at night!”
“I’ll just leave a message,” I said,
dialing. “I can’t let this one get away.”
“You have to—we can’t afford it.”
To my shock a man answered.
“It’s funny about that little house,” he
said after I told him what listing I was
calling about. “I just posted it yesterday and already I’ve had three calls.”
“I want to make an offer,” I blurted.
There was a startled noise from Dan
beside me and a long silence on the
phone. “Hello?” I said. “Still there?”
“I’m here,” the agent said. “I think you
just said you want to make an offer.”
“That’s right.” I named a figure 30
percent lower than the listing price—a
little trick I’d picked up from my informal night course in real estate.
“You do know,” he said, not unkindly,
“that most people actually look at a
house before buying it?”
“I’ll see it during the inspection.”
“It’s the middle of January,” he
warned. “There could be snow.”
“You plow the roads up there, right?”
I asked, suddenly uncertain.
“Oh yes, we plow,” the man said.
“Just mind the drifts. Sometimes the
road disappears.”
wo weeks later Dan and
TI were driving north. In
Maine the big, lazy snowflakes of New Hampshire
turned small and mean. I reduced our
speed to 10 miles an hour on Skyline
Drive, the two-lane road that serves as
a shortcut to Canada from Bangor, if
you don’t fly off the road.
“Whose idea was this?” Dan asked.
“Maybe we should turn around,” I
said as we passed a third ditched car.
My husband, however, had learned to
drive in Wisconsin, where real men wear
T-shirts in winter. He took the wheel
and we soldiered on. We were headed
to PEI for the home inspection—$275
thrown away if the house turned out
to be a dud, Dan reminded me.
LADIES’ HOME JOURNAL
JULY 09
