We decided NOT to sell our house.

In other words, we’re staying.

Which is weird because we’ve been working all year to sell it. But we know that we don’t want to have showings punctuating fall semester so we’re pulling her off the market.

We love our house, we’ve always loved it. We just had decided to find a house that had some other qualities that ours didn’t. My new life verse is a good teaching for us to take to heart at this time:

Treasure what you have like it’s the greatest thing in the world, because if you start longing for something you don’t have – not only will you not get it, but what you have will be taken away from you.

It’s a fascinating teaching, because by taken itself it would advocate a kind of ethnocentric, status-loving, stasis-endorsing nowness, that would preclude any thought of Then or There. And I have to admit that that’s the scariest religion I can imagine.

This teaching is: contentment. And I’m trying to apply the principle indiscriminately to everything in my life: my possessions, my history, my opportunities, my relationships…

Which makes it a very hard teaching. It’s a check against: Greed. Regret. (and thus) Bitterness. Jealousy. Selfishness.

It does advocate a “now”ness which reverberates with Buber’s “thou”ness…

And now, I’m walking scarily close to a bad impression of Dr. Seuss.

So like Tigers who pee to mark their territory and like artists who try to use brushes and colors to revision their worlds – we’re painting the whole house again.

Some of you know that we underwent a Beiging of the house sometime in the spring where we bled every Turquoise and Map Blue shade out of our children’s rooms in order to please the realtors / the nebulous “mainstream” housing market. It felt like a ritual of humiliation and hegemony. If I could have I would have played “March Slav” at the top of the stereo speakers voice. Or “Anatevka.”

I asked Cliff and Mary and Lynn what book they’d like to write before they finish with their lives – and they all had brilliant books that they’re practically poised to write; I had nothing. Well, I did have a huge plate of Angelo‘s homemade pasta with olives, garlic, pesto and roasted peppers. But maybe I should write a book called The Beiging of of America. I have no idea what its about, but it sounds like an interesting title, eh?

We’re also trying to “catch up” with some of the landscaping that Casacommunitas demands.

Can you say: rainforest? We bought a bottle of pesticides big enough to kill both our children…And we wish we weren’t going to spray it all over the borders of the yard, but does anyone know how else to undo the fierce garden of weeds that threatens to overtake our neighbors yards as well as our own?