APRIL, THEN MAY, WAYNESWORD 2009
My last piece was a bit shrill, maybe harsh, I admit, but I was trying to shake things up a bit, with regard to the market, and the weather as well. As it turns out, I didn’t really have to do anything but keep my head down and keep working hard—both the weather and the local economy would finally improve, slowly, on their own.
But the first full month of spring is always a month of extremes—still the occasional blast of frigid temperatures in upstate NY—balanced by the first swirl of
balmy winds, with the sound of peepers in the local ponds and swamps. The visuals can be stark before the buds are in bloom on the trees, as I recount below.
We had a couple of impromptu Bonfires to inaugurate the seasonal shift: the first one, in very early April, was held on the first clear, starry night of the month without torrential winds—the Bonfire to Encourage Winter to Leave. There were still patches of snow and ice on the ground as we symbolically burned the Christmas tree for that ceremony. Then a couple of weeks later, before the birch leaves burst out to bring the color back to our immediate surroundings, we began a belated Bonfire to Welcome the Warm Air Back. This ritual had the added benefit of helping us dispense with some dried-out brush and garden debris, but other than the initial flare-up, we kept the fire brief and manageable in size so as not to alarm our suburban neighbors with our quasi-pagan ways, though many of them like a good fire too.
Another striking aspect of April was the witnessed birth of four new kittens in the Perras household—other than watching each of our three children emerge into the world (via C-section each time, God Bless my wife for enduring that), I can’t say I’ve seen a live pet birth since I was about 8 years old. It began while my 15 year old son was home alone, and he quickly summoned us to come home, freaking out a bit at the spurting blood and by-products of birth. I got there soon thereafter, on a late Saturday afternoon, and saw our little calico momma cat Mika deliver the second one in a somewhat agitated fashion. Then my daughter, her aunt, and two of her cousins showed up to watch Mika put forth the third one, as if it was a spectator event by then, with 6 of us paying close attention. We thought she was done at that point, and began to clean up the basement “cat nursery” as best we could, with a blanket in a fancy cardboard box as the new mother’s nest. Slowly the kittens found her nipples as she got used to the idea, and her maternal instincts kicked in. Still, she was a bit careless about rolling around on top of them at first, and we weren’t sure they all would’ve survived if we hadn’t been there to rearrange things here and there. Giving her some Reiki seemed to help calm her through the whole process, and she purred fitfully as her new brood fed, until abruptly getting up and yowling as she prowled in a circle once more. We weren’t sure what was going on with her until the fourth and final kitten began to slide out, like a dark tube of gooey glue, almost as an afterthought. We were seeing a live biology class in our rec room. Would Mika acknowledge her 4th child, about an hour after her ordeal started when the first—and loudest-- one burst forth? Reluctantly, she held off on nursing the other three while she cleaned up the last of the litter, a small loner who predictably became my daughter’s favorite.
That made seven cats in the household where two had been the norm for years. We’re not sure how many we’ll keep, but needless to say, the two older cats, who were fixed a few years back, are none too tolerant of the newcomers, like elder residents of a changing neighborhood. I’ll keep you posted on the sociology of the feline colony as life goes on—another reason for homeownership I guess, as no landlord would be fond of this scenario.
Intimations of Symbolic Wealth…
There was a morning early in the second week of April when I woke before
dawn and while waiting for the cast-iron pan to heat up for the home fries and eggs, watched the first crack of the sun started striking the heavily-frosted grass out back, resulting in a few thousand glimmers of prismatic emerald and topaz, plus glints of rubies and garnet. It was a stunning display of riches, but very subtle. Since the view depended on the low early angle of the sun refracting off a still-frozen lawn, with the air temp still in the 20’s, I knew it wouldn’t last. Still, I absorbed the vision for what it was worth, and things seem to be getting better day by day.
The market was improving with the weather in our area, and it seemed reassuring that the spring real estate ritual proceeded unimpeded, like a perennial Easter Egg Hunt. Two of my listings received beneficial contracts during the week in question, and a handful of other buyers I work with seemed to be seeing promising properties and nearing decisions. Commercial projects I’d been working on during dank days of winter also began to come to fruition. Long months of searching and detective work, criss-crossing the Capital District and Saratoga County in endless automotive circuits, would soon pay off. The doubts that cloud one’s mind in the long, sometimes excruciating, north country winter began to dissolve like morning mist in the warmth of the day. Finally.
It brings back a John Mayer song that sounded great when I first heard it live at SPAC a few years back:
I… am… In Re-pair,
I’m not together, but
I’m getting there…
During April, The local Earth was In Re-pair from winter; the Market was In Re-pair from the devastations of last fall; and my personal Psyche was In Re-pair from a sleepless, restless several months encompassing both. I’m sure I was not alone in this. I’m a keen student of the moods of the market, as I see it reflected in the faces of individual consumers.
I have seen hesitation, procrastination, severe reservations, doubts and dissent, all acted out in the real estate arena over the course of the past year and a half. Only now do I see a spring thaw in the attitudes of the Buyer Clients with whom I work. President Obama’s $8000. Tax Credit for first-time Buyers, or those returning-to-the-market-after 3 years or more, has achieved the desired effect of at least creating motivation for those Buyers to overcome their fears and begin to seriously look at purchasing homes. Even then, I haven’t seen too many of them jump into a contract without being extremely circumspect.
Not that being careful isn’t a good thing, but sometimes I see the doubt creep in so strongly that it causes a bit of paralysis-- and why is this? As I write this, rates for a 30 year fixed rate loan are/were 4.875%-- the inventory in every price category isgreater than it’s been since about year 2000—and both Realtors and Sellers are more anxious to swing a deal than ever before. Still, for all but the most savvy and confident Buyers, there is hesitation. Having seen so much of it, I think it has become a nameable sociological phenomenon in itself— Financial Freeze-up on the Frontlines of the Economy— or FFFE, for short.
WHICH CAME FIRST :
THE MEDIA-BRED FEAR, OR THE FEAR ITSELF?
When I caught a bit of a chest cold in March, hacking impolitely for a week or two after not being sick all winter, my beleaguered mind at the time wondered whether it was something worse—strep throat, or pneumonia, or a bronchial infection—but still I resisted going to see a doctor, stubborn adult male that I am. Turns out it was just a persistent virus, nothing worse, but I was always tired, and felt totally unproductive. Most people would’ve assumed it to be the flu— for which my wife read me the metaphysical connotation (via Louise Hay) out of her Little Blue Book, which said:
Influenza: Response to mass negativity and
beliefs. Fear. Belief in statistics.
And so—as the news begins to burgeon with the latest “swine flu” scare in late April & early May, remember the wise words of Ms. Hay-- the flu bug is something just as contagious as economic malaise—the mental virus which I admit to succumbing to at times this past winter, and last fall. But spring is the cure for that, and I don’t care to look backward at winter, or bleakness, anymore…and I’ going to build up my immune system to defend against both sorts of infection from this point on.
That’s what I am contemplating writing about just as Bella coaxes me out back on the first late April afternoon that truly feels like summer—it’s a Saturday, and I should be inside, typing this piece, with the workweek behind me and the day’s chores mostly done. She tugs at my hand, like she used to a decade ago, before she could even talk, and now at age eleven, when some girls begin to not even speak to their dads, she laughingly says to me: “Come play with me!” And who am I to resist? Twenty five or thirty years ago, I would’ve loved a lass to say that to me, and now, at age 53, I am lucky to have a daughter who can pull me out of my literary funk, my middle-aged lassitude, and talk me into jumping on the trampoline with her.
This is what made me think of winter—that poor trampoline. We had left it set up all winter where it was, under the butternut tree out behind the stone wall. A scant two months ago it was so laden down with the weight of three feet of snow and compressed ice that the mat almost touched the ground, bowing like a stressed-out inverted parabola. It mirrored the weight I felt all winter.
But now in the eighty degree fluke of an April day, all trace of snow, even in the deep woods out back, has officially faded away. The remnant leaves which had accrued a foot deep since last fall, were also blown away by the stiff whistling winds of yesterday. The trampoline mat, unburdened and level again, shows no ill signs of the weight it bore, and I wish I could be that resilient.
I just ate…I protest to Bella, trying to get out of the exhilarating act of being a kid again.
So did I—you have to go with me, she insists, still laughing, beguilingly.
I pull back from the atrium doorway; she yanks me outward.
I’ve gotta get some work done…maybe I can just watch you for awhile……
Half-heartedly, I try to joke my way out of it. But once again, I part paths with what I would do with my time, if alone, to share some with one of my three school-age children.
And I figure, how much longer is she going to keep asking me to join her in frivolity if I resist now? These are precious years, the ones they’ve dubbed “tweens”— pretty soon there won’t be much occasion for the trampoline.
So I reluctantly enter the “trampoline zone.” Since we have one of those safety nets suspended by poles all around, you have to enter by ducking through the overlap of fabric—sometimes a tricky tactic for a 200 pound dad. But I make it through the mesh gauntlet and from the first jump I am transported instantly back to fourth or fifth grade, the huge platform tramps we had in gym class back then—the liberating feeling of it being “your turn” after standing around the frame being a “spotter” for so long.
I find it a useful lesson in resilience to climb up there and bounce. The endorphins start pounding in your skull by about the tenth bounce. The elevation you get from a well-controlled bounce will put you in the weightless territory of NBA athletes and astronauts, for a long second or two each time. We are bouncing together at first, in sync, but then we both start giggling like idiots and I slow down and she speeds up and I start sinking faster, till our bounces are opposite each others and we are propelling each other to dangerous heights as a result, cackling and cracking up.
Then we try some synchronized knee drops and seat drops and even a back drop or two. It really is guaranteed hilarity, two people on a trampoline, the mis-haps and mis-hops. At one point I collapse and flop, just lay there looking up through the still-bare branches of the butternut tree above. The sky above could not be any more glorious than if it was mid-summer already. I thought of how I used to tell my home-buying clients to “look up” while you’re looking at your prospective dwelling, as the view of the sun and the sky and the night stars was part of what you were acquiring. Our view of the sky has always been quite nice out there in the sticks, no matter what the weather.
My heart was pounding luxuriantly, and the sweet upcountry air of the Middle Grove foothills was in my lungs, warm and sultry for the first such evening of the year 2009. I was laughing with my daughter on a Saturday evening, no where else to go, no where else to be. The pressures of work and finances and the phone ringing had all faded into the background, behind the quiet deafening din of endorphins in my brain.
Another quote from Louise Hay came into place, in a Chapter on Money & Abundance, this time borrowed from Socrates:
“Contentment is natural wealth; luxury is artificial poverty.”
And that was re-inforced by an intonation of Frank Sinatra’s, from my parents’ day, a tune they both always liked:
“No, No, they Can’t take That a-way from me, Nooooo—
They can’t take That away from me.”
Which then, in the psyche of the former college-radio DJ, segues to the sanguine voice of Dave Matthews, singing the opening strains of “So Damn Lucky”:
Ev-ry thing’s diff’rent….
My head in the clouds….
And I realize I’ve always had that tendency, to be too abstract, to live in the mind, a parallel literary universe of my own devising, and how owning real estate has made me a more rooted individual, particularly once family was involved.
The ads you see now about the Benefits of Homeownership only show a superficial moment or two of the process—they should show a normal grubby-looking weekend dad playing catch in the backyard with his kids, or the kids and their friends playing hoop or four-square in the driveway, or the kids learning to ride bikes on the cul-de-sac, or the kids playing stickball on an urban street, if that’s what they’ve got to work with.
So, once I’ve had these re-inforcing revelations, I tell Bella I’ve had enough, and have to go back inside and write down all these great insights—I might have a new poem in my head if I capture it quickly enough, which hasn’t happened in months—but she giggles maniacally and says, Oh, no, you’re not done yet… and clenches the mesh doorway shut so I can’t get out. Then I am laughing so hard I can’t resist her stubbornness, and comply with her demand that I continue to jump, and play some more.
When she finally lets me stop I am euphoric with elastic endorphins. It is the same feeling—or better than—I get when I go mountain biking real hard, or play an hour’s worth of outdoor hoop, or take a hike on an afternoon in the Adirondacks. But
I realize I don’t do any of those other things quite enough—and the trampoline is right in the backyard. What is my excuse for not doing this more often? Just because I am 53 years old, and technically no kid anymore? Why do we resist what is good for us?
Why do we postpone and put off euphoria?
The First-Time Buyer Analogy…
Maybe it’s the same general reason that people hesitate to buy a house—inertia. We stick with the routines we feel safe in—not too much exertion or extra effort or reaching for the next plateau of accomplishment. It’s not that we can’t afford it, or wouldn’t enjoy it, but that it requires an external push to get over the hump.
My daughter provided a push for me that day, and I hope to be able to provide that similar enthusiastic won’t-take-No-for-an-answer motivation for the 6 or 7 first time Buyers I am working with this spring… Some of them are couples, some are single—and some of the single Buyers are of each gender. Some are aggressive; some are casual lookers. Most are anxious to qualify for that $8000. tax credit Mr. Obama has offered;some are more interested in getting a garden ready in the backyard as soon as they can; some a home office or a studio are what they seek the most; others crave a front porch for summertime people watching. Many of them are anxious to have friends or relatives stay over in a manner that they cannot accommodate in their rental situation.
It is safe to say that ALL OF THEM are looking for a BARGAIN before they commit their money and their futures to the process. I can’t blame them for that; and it is my job to search out and identify those possible deals, unique to each of them.
Once they agree to duck through the tunnel and into the Real Estate Arena…
I would counsel them to jump in with both feet, enjoy the bouncing, and realize that the ups and downs are part of the ride. I will do my best to make it enjoyable for them— a learning process, strewn with a few laughs along the way. The end result is a sense of gain, and of stability, and of a wholesome basis for living your life.
Commentators have noted that a market like this makes the good Realtors return to basics: well, for me, “Basics” has always included finding first-time Home Buyers the best first home possible. In reviewing my archives recently, I find that a great number of those I helped in that regard are still happily ensconced in that first home—meaning the choice they made initially was the correct one.
I hope to help create more real estate results like that in the next year to come—starting with my favorite month of May.
More market re-caps to come in June, but I will have to hold off on any grand analysis till then, and till then, enjoy the growing peak of the deepening greenery, here in the (once-again) Great Northeast.
--Copyright Wayne Perras 2009