Catching Up

It's been more than a month since I added anything to this blog, and not much has been happening. Then one morning while I was doing a bit of yard work I heard someone nearby pounding something into rocky ground. When I went to investigate, I discovered what turned out to be a real estate agent putting a sign up in the vacant lot directly across the street from us. One of the things we enjoy about our house is that it's surrounded by vacant lots. The one next door we own, and one of the two behind us is owned by a neighbor. The one directly behind us remains vacant, but the owner doesn't want to sell, although we haven't asked her lately. All four of the lots across the street from us on our cul de sac, called a cove here in our development, are vacant. One has gone on the market and changed owners a couple of times since we moved in, but it's down in a sort of hole at the bottom of the block and even with a house on it would not interfere with our view. The one lot we have been most concerned about was the one just across the street, and now it appeared to be going up for sale.

I walked over to talk with the agent who informed me that the owners, a real estate firm in Florida, were selling that lot and seven or eight others they own in our area. I pretended not to know who the owners were, although I'd looked them up and had even thought about contacting them about selling. I didn't want to appear too eager, just seeming to be a curious neighbor. I inquired what they were asking, and he told me a larger sum than I wanted to hear. I said it sounded a bit expensive for our neighborhood, but he informed me that property values were going up, which apparently was one reason they were now ready to sell. I knew he was right. Local builders are building eight or nine new houses within just a few blocks of us, more activity than we've seen since we moved here just about five years ago. It probably has something to do with the end of the drought and the return of the lake, now completely full for more than a year; that and the continuing rise in housing costs anywhere near Austin. We've seen entire developments springing up in a matter of a few months between us and the city. We had assumed we were too far out to be part of all that, but alas that no longer seems to be the case.

So I gave the agent my email address, and later that afternoon he sent me the details. I replied with an offer closer to what we thought the lot should be worth and reached an agreement with the seller in what seemed no more than a few minutes. Once again we were buying property more or less online. The real estate agent contacted a title company, sent us a contract via an online document service. We signed electronically, and in a matter of about two weeks we bought the lot and thus ensured that no one would build a house there to spoil our view or peer into our windows from across the street -- at least not in our lifetimes.

While all that was going on, I also managed to get my garden planted, once again with four different varieties of tomatoes, some sweet basil, a bit of parsley, dill, and cilantro, and this time with a couple of yellow squash plants. I'm still hoping to try some zucchini again this year, but I haven't found any healthy looking plants yet. So far we've had some good rains and everything seems to be thriving except the yellow squash, which usually seems to give me trouble. Tomatoes are starting to appear with tiny little round fruit emerging on most of the plants. And even the dill is doing well so far. We've already harvested some of that and the parsley and cilantro and basil for our salads and to augment our Amy's frozen pizzas.

My reading has also been continuing at a good pace. I've completed the next two of our book club selections: Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Cell: An Intimate History and J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir. In the meanwhile I finished re-reading the remaining Barbara Pym novels, A Few Green Leaves (1980) and An Unsuitable Attachment (written in 1963 and published posthumously in 1982). I think of those as the last of her novels, but in fact there were three others published after she died: Crampton Hodnet (1985), An Academic Question (1986), and Civil to Strangers (1987). These were all written at various stages of her writing career, but never published in her lifetime. I'm saving them for later, but I do remember enjoying them when I first read them as they came out. As I have said, I only discovered Barbara Pym in the early 1980s during one of our trips to England, by which time she had already died. Her novels have proven to be the perfect escape for me in these strange days, a journey back to a saner time and place, or so it now seems in hindsight.

The book club books were both challenging and informative. Much in the earlier chapters of The Cell goes over ground well covered by my rather good education in biology. But from the quest to discover the structure of DNA forward things get more complicated and more interesting. I'm anticipating a good discussion later this week, especially given the number of scientists and physicians in our group. Hillbilly Elegy was a more exasperating book. Here again there was much that was familiar. I have some Scotch-Irish ancestry, and the similarities between Appalachian hillbillies and Texas rednecks are too numerous to go into. As I told J when I began reading the book, I've been trying to get away from this sort of behavior most of my life. But J.D. Vance is a good storyteller, and he does a good job of explaining what he sees as some of the most persistent problems with America's white underclass. In the end I was convinced that there really is little hope for improvement, either in the lot of those Vance is writing about, or in the state of America's broken social and political cultures. By the time I finished I was already thinking about diving back into Barbara Pym, but I am putting that off for a while to continue reading Gerald Durrell's Corfu Trilogy, actually just another form of escape back to a more rational time and place.