My wife and I spent the weekend in South Carolina

My wife and I spent the weekend up in Columbia, South Carolina with our daughter who is house shopping.  It was a neat experience.  The house she is looking at is almost twenty five miles from town.  It is an old one room schoolhouse that has been converted into a nice little house with three miniscule bedrooms and two baths.  The house is filled with really lovely antique furniture which would NOT (unfortunately) come with the house.  The living room is large, with knotty pine paneling on two walls and some really terrible wallpaper on the other two. (I was tempted to say that it was the worst wallpaper in the world, but I had forgotten the master bedroom which has the WORST wallpaper in the world.)  Wallpaper aside, it is very nice.  It has a long path down to an in-ground swimming pool right in the middle of the front yard.  It well may be the only pool I have ever seen in the front center of a very large yard.

   The yard is fenced but has a large woodsy space behind the yard with lovely oak trees and the ground covered almost an inch thick with   acorns.  Daughter mentioned that when she was there a week ago there had been a deer stand on one of the trees.  The owner (actually the owner’s son, his mother is now in a nursing home with altsheimers, ) said that there are deer, turkeys, foxes and raccoons out in the back.  My wife jokingly asked daughter if she might use the deer stand to hunt deer.  Her reply was “Certainly not, she would use it to watch and photograph the wild life.”   The environmental biologist in her is heavily at work.  There are a couple of acres at the side where once there was a double wide trailer, and it already has septic and well access.  Wife said “Maybe we could come up here and build a house on that lot.”  He daughter replied that maybe we could put a ‘travel trailer’ there.  Rejection is tough.

All in all, it was a lovely visit, and after much agonizing daughter has made an offer on the house.  If she gets it, three of my six will be home owners, and as we arrived home, my son the college librarian called to say that he is looking at a new house to buy.  That would make four of the six children homeowners.  If that doesn’t make you feel “older” nothing will.  ( Well, actually being a great grandfather has already done that).  Strangely enough we are house hunting too, and are considering a place out in the woods. (No turkeys, but deer are all over the place).  Well, off to bed.   Janet is going to teach for the next few weeks (she’s teaching class in Shakespeare at the local charter school (of which she was one of the founders, and even I spent many weeks writing curricula for it), So I will be mostly alone.  I hope I can get out in the studio and sculpt, or out in the yard to  paint (My wife bought me a beautiful easel and a bunch of oil and acrylic paints for Christmas).  Who knows, I might come back to life.