7310 Willow Street, Takoma Park, MD (2012)

"Dislocations do not always prove to be as perilous as they seem."

Three years into our Exile, The Muse and I were Exiled again when our landlord informed us that he would sell the Sherman Street house. He and his wife were relocating back to the States from The Hague and needed the cash out of that house to buy themselves a place in Houston—no hard feelings, nothing personal. We would have put an offer on the place if we had been in any position to purchase it, but we were still recovering from our bankruptcy three years earlier and couldn't quite imagine floating the deal. We'd been juggling finances since we began our Exile. The Muse had contracted with a couple to make a down payment on a rent-to-own arrangement that gave us some cushion, but that deal had fallen apart after less than a year. Those renters had left the place worse for their wear. The Muse's son agreed to move in and help recover from the damage for reduced rent, so we'd been paying premium rent in Takoma Park and subsidizing our original mortgage back home.

The last thing either of us wanted was to go out searching for another place to live. Rents had increased in the three years since we'd found the Sherman Street house, a place about a third the size of our home back home, for which we paid about twice what we'd paid for our mortgage. A replacement would cost even more. We'd recently lost our car, too, after The Muse had been rear-ended while running some errands. We'd gone carless for a couple of months before buying a friend's used one. The move would not be paid for by The Muse's employer, either, like our original Exile move had been. Dislocation can prove expensive.

The landlord gave us two months to find a place, an impossibly short time. I began repeating the patterns I'd learned when searching for the Sherman Street place. It had worked once and might work for us again. We knew we wanted to stay in Takoma Park, which limited our choices. Initially, the options seemed suitably grim, as they always do when setting out to accomplish some impossibility. None of the available places seemed habitable. We looked at what I was sure had once been a donkey shed converted into a condo. Locations seemed much worse than what we were used to, too. I finally found a place that, while not ideal, could have proved serviceable. We looked at it twice before agreeing to the outrageous price, leaving with a sinking feeling that we'd made a grave mistake. Two days later, I happened upon a For Rent sign on a better house on a much better street and quickly scheduled a walk-through. This one was much more expensive, but also a much bigger house with a yard complete with some garden space in the back. The Muse visited and confirmed that it was preferable, so I got to inform the first landlord that I'd decided to take another place. I felt terrible about it but not awful enough to accept that first place as our fate.

There were complications, as there are always complications. We needed to be out of Sherman Street by November 1, and the new place on Willow wouldn't be available until December 1. We'd have to store our stuff for a month and find alternative lodging for ourselves and our cats through November, a considerable additional expense we couldn't avoid. Friends agreed to take the cats, and the clever Muse scheduled a few weeks of meetings at her home office in Colorado. I'd trail along. We could visit family over Thanksgiving, too, and fill out the month without incurring too much additional expense.

The move went smoothly. We were only three or four blocks away from Sherman. Our friends from there still stopped by. The new place featured a basement mother-in-law apartment, and we quickly found a young intern to rent it. My office in this place was huge, with built-in bookshelves and windows overlooking a decently landscaped backyard. One end of the second-floor master bedroom featured windows on three sides. We could lie in our bed there and see as if we were lying in a tree fort outside. We could open the screened windows in temperate weather and feel like we were on an old-fashioned sleeping porch.

Our intern stayed for several months before finding a better place after being hired full-time. Our next tenant was a professor of philosophy at the University of Tajikistan who was on a Fulbright scholarship to write a paper on culture. He came up to make coffee every morning, and we had many confusing conversations. I even tried to help him edit his paper, but I made little headway. He spoke a half dozen languages. I figured he spoke all the others better than he spoke English.

After three years of Exile, I was finally in a yard where I could exercise my gardening urges. I volunteered to remove some old holly roots from one of the back beds and got introduced to digging in the native chert and clay. Those roots went down four feet before they finally gave out. I finished the bed with peat and compost, leaving it as soft and fryable as the finest potting soil. I bent the heck out of my turning fork doing it, though. For the following three years, Willow Street served as our address. We were closer to the Metro than we had been on Sherman. The kitchen was huge, and I used it to cater to those salon suppers for Mitzi. The Muse also invited visiting colleagues over to suppers there. We convened several memorable evenings, where I usually ended the proceedings by singing a few of my songs. We were almost as comfortable on Willow as we had been back home. Dislocations do not always prove to be as perilous as they first seem. Exiles can eventually come to feel very much like home.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Exiled, #PureSchmaltz