By Georgia Osten
I don’t know why this came to mind this week. I was lying on the couch, looking up at the ceiling, freezing my socks off and I guess all these memories came flooding back because I wondered what it would be like to be back in Sugar Land during this past week. Would we have lost power for 4-5 days, would we have been without water for 4-5 days. Would we have had to have a generator we paid a fortune for, that just died? I mean, dead, no sign of life after sustaining us for the first 4 days. Then, the power came back on, then off for another 9 hours, no sign of life.

So, my other memories came back to the staging/selling of our house. Which, by the way, sold in a heartbeat. I still had another two weeks of work clear across town. My husband had already retired, just a week or so before me. That’s okay, I went to live with my daughter who was further away from my work.

The lady (NOT), who was married to our real estate guy, was the Stager. Brutal! “This is not a beach house, all this beach house stuff has to go!” Okay, I said sheepishly. “And, all these family pictures of your family have to go, no one wants to look at your family.” I thought to myself, just go ahead and slap me, I guess I deserve it.

But, when she began bashing my 3-legged dog and how Ruby didn’t need to be in the house when we were trying to sell it, I began to panic. I said, “but Ruby lives here.” She cruelly looked me right in the eyes and said, “she stinks!”

Oh my goodness, what was I to do? When I found out the house was to be shown, Ruby and I would pile into the car and hide out down the street until the interested parties left.

Our Stager did have a couple of good ideas, which I followed reluctantly. We had little snacks, packages or chips, cookies, little bottled waters, stuff like that around for our visitors. We even had a bottle of red wine and a couple of wine glasses on the dining room table, just for coziness.

We came home from work one day only to find the wine bottle had been opened and the used wine glasses sat abandoned on the table, along with a thank you note.

These are the folks who bought our house. I guess that little red-headed shrew knew a thing or two. I called her something much worse, I can’t repeat.

[Feb-22-2010]