A late night babysitting an overheated brain

The best possible outcomes in two recent stress-inducing situations have come to pass, and it's filling me with anxiety and sadness. One situation, the next phase in my husband's training, is easy to talk about. The other, my grandmother's death early this morning after a long illness, is not. I'm relieved that she's not suffering, but the weight and velocity of feelings I can't name calls for silence on that for now.

My husband was selected for the exact type of training he's been wanting for years now, despite what looked like longer than long odds. Much celebrating has taken the place of our usual monastic, budget-conscious rituals, and in a departure from custom, we've had the time and resources to househunt as a team. The last two moves were unilateral decisions out of necessity-- Florida was up to him and Texas was mine-- but being able to share the burden for our next move is fortunate since it looks like it might be the most challenging. In one of my less sober moments this weekend, I put it succinctly to a friend, "Dude, there's fuck all for housing out there."

The town is smaller than any I've ever lived in before, including, I'm pretty sure, the company compound I lived on in Saudi Arabia. A chipper, pot-bellied realtor with a handlebar moustache showed us several houses in our modest price range, and I got the distinct feeling that at least two of them were on the market because the residents had recently died. The random details death and realtors forget are unsettling: a half empty bottle of Listerine, a "Reagan '84" bumpersticker plastered on a garage wall, tiny bookshelf labels where a collection had been carefully organized by genre, and an old spotted oven mitt abandoned at the back of a drawer.

The smell of an old house recently emptied is also something I'm not used to. Phantom dinners linger under generations of cats and dust, which is all overpowered by that distinct old people smell-- old clothes, old books, old habits. The places are empty, but they're heavy with history that makes me feel like I'm intruding as I wander from room to room thinking about paint colors and what it would take to rip out carpet. One place had chrome handlebars bolted to the bathtub and a ramp leading out the back door. The realtor mentioned that there had been an estate sale recently, but was vague about what had actually happened to the resident, leaving open the possibility that maybe he had just moved to a nursing home. Out the kitchen window I could see a calico cat lounging just off the edge of the back porch, in a worn patch of shade under a bush. I wondered if maybe he was a detail left behind, too.

The other houses were sobering, the kind of creative renovation and design disasters that make soul-less cookie-cutter apartments seem like welcome blank slates. There's only so much forgiveness a small house can muster, especially when its owners watch too much "Trading Spaces" and "This Old House." After seeing the Cheeto-orange bathroom and the three-foot vertical drop-off mid-living room in a house that smelled strongly of baked urine, I was ready for the end of the Parade of Frankenstein Homes. One small panic attack and one large bag of M&M's, I agreed that we could call it a day and return later with [lowered expectations] open minds, and give it another shot.

For now the decision is between the sterile gated community of brand new four-plexes wedged tight up against each other with scraps of manicured grass filling in the short hop from front door to parking lot (i.e., a dog's idea of hell), and an as-yet-undiscovered rental house without too many battle scars and not on the side of town that gets completely sealed off every morning when the train rattles through.

Bright and early tomorrow morning the search continues, and seeing as how it's now almost 2 a.m. and I've only just written the rind off this giant swelling knot of anxiety and unnameable weirdness, I can tell it's going to be a long day.