The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Half the South End is For Sale. Three quarters of the neighborhood have real estate signs out by the driveway, everything from WindyRear Realty to Reflux Realty. They used to hold open houses on the weekend, but after 3 or 4 years, I guess even the optimism of a realtor starts to look like a horny snake courting a garden hose. Or vice versa.

Some of the homeowners have given up too, bought haciendas in Arizona or trailer court lots in Nevada. They come motoring back in their 40 foot mobile homes when the asphalt starts to melt down there and the gila monsters stay under the rocks all day. I guess they’re the optimists, folks who figure the housing bubble will eventually swell up again and they’ll get the million dollars they thought the place was inflated to back in the carefree days before October 2008 when the betting stopped and the banks had to show their cards. House of cards, it turned out, one very bad bet.

We’ve gone through the Boom and Bust cycles on the South End many times since I lost a wheel on the Conestoga and decided to stay put. Folks find out the neighbor sold for twice what anybody dreamed somebody would pay and next thing you know, everybody figures they can sell now and retire like a dot.com executive. Signs sprout up and proliferate like nettles in chicken manure, eventually they DO sell or the sellers give up and we return to normal. Although … normal may just be more of those selling binges than living our lives, hard to say.

The realtors do fine most of the time. Commission coming in, commission going out. Rita, down at WindyRear’s North End office, tells them when they’re ready to get rich, come on back, she’ll sell their dream house for 50% more than they paid. There’s ALWAYS another house — the real dream is making money.

Personally — and nothing against the wisdom of Rita the Realtor — I don’t care how much my bank account would swell, I wouldn’t want to end up in a trailer park in Nevada. I don’t care how good the air conditioning is.

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