UNDER THE MAINE SUN

STATE OF OUR ASSETS AFTER THE DOWNGRADE

Watching British films, I've often heard a phrase, "Safe as houses." I heard it in Howard's End among others. The housing market may be rocky right now but a house isn't likely to curl up and disappear. 

I've been watching the commentaries about the stock market's aftermath since the big S&P downgrade of American debt. The people who panicked and sold off at a loss are the big losers. Unless they're quite young, there's no way to recoup. I agree with the experts who say to hold and wait it out.

Meanwhile, most of my money is in houses -- and they're still there. Their prices might be lower than I would like, but I won't be wiped out. Even though there's some leveraging through mortgages, I didn't over-extend beyond what payments I can keep up with. I hope you don't either.

I'm not a financial expert by any means -- haven't made any fortunes. But even though I don't have a lot of money, my assets are still there through all this.

I just heard Jack Cafferty on CNN giving his opinion -- ranting about the politicians who are on vacation now through this stock market drop. I don't have much sympathy for those of them who caused this state of affairs due to their politicizing the country's financial crisis. But I do take exception to his criticism of President Obama who bore the terrible burden through these last weeks. He was under enormous pressure and still is. Mr. Cafferty, who I used to like, criticized him roundly for celebrating his 50th birthday at this time. I think our President deserves a break! He was, after all, live on TV today trying to reassure investors and the American people that our country's financial status is a lot better than the S&P downgrade would indicate.  My opinion is that our President deserves some R&R -- he doesn't get much!

No houses selling just yet, but sooner or later they will. I'm impatient but not panicking!

Jean, Still in Maine

SHORT SALE, AUCTION and OTHER REAL ESTATE EVENTS

My recent experience with short sales has been quite a trip. I made an offer on a sweet little house in North Carolina for the full asking price of the short sale. The owners accepted, but it had to be approved by their bank. Short sale means the bank is supposedly willing to accept less than the seller owes them. 

All seemed well and we were waiting for confirmation of our closing date. Waiting. Waiting. The bank kept asking the seller for more documentation on their end. Waiting. Then my realtor got a phone call from their realtor. The bank had "accidentally" let it slip into foreclosure. Real bummer for the sellers who now have a foreclosure on their credit record. Bummer for me, but not hopeless -- I could just keep looking.

I decided to wait until winter to look for the next little place to fix up and "flip." Meanwhile, my realtor, Bill Millwood, suggested that we follow up and try to buy the property at auction. He knew I was still interested -- after all I had already drawn up a budget and made the plan for the fix-up.  I went out and bought 3 books on buying at auction and am now wading through them. They pretty much say the same thing -- I could have saved a couple of bucks by only buying one.

SHORT SALE, AUCTION and OTHER REAL ESTATE EVENTS

My recent experience with short sales has been quite a trip. I made an offer on a sweet little house in North Carolina for the full asking price of the short sale. The owners accepted, but it had to be approved by their bank. Short sale means the bank is supposedly willing to accept less than the seller owes them. 

All seemed well and we were waiting for confirmation of our closing date. Waiting. Waiting. The bank kept asking the seller for more documentation on their end. Waiting. Then my realtor got a phone call from their realtor. The bank had "accidentally" let it slip into foreclosure. Real bummer for the sellers who now have a foreclosure on their credit record. Bummer for me, but not hopeless -- I could just keep looking.

I decided to wait until winter to look for the next little place to fix up and "flip." Meanwhile, my realtor, Bill Millwood, suggested that we follow up and try to buy the property at auction. He knew I was still interested -- after all I had already drawn up a budget and made the plan for the fix-up.  I went out and bought 3 books on buying at auction and am now wading through them. They pretty much say the same thing -- I could have saved a couple of bucks by only buying one.

MY LEGACY -- AND LESSONS LEARNED

I recently saw a quote from Karen Kaiser Clark:  Life is change. Growth is optional. Choose wisely.

Although I'm sure I have grown, I haven't always chosen wisely.  Who has? But at least I believe I've learned from the unwise decisions.

When assigned to give thought to my legacy and what it might be, I asked my daughters what they thought. One declined to respond. Perhaps she thinks I'll leave nothing of value to be remembered. My other daughter gave me a wealth of characteristics and values that she feels she has gained.

OLDER WOMEN REINVENTING THEMSELVES -- THEIR LEGACIES

Aging is a difficult challenge for everyone. Some people do it gracefully (I'm not one of those), and some do it kicking and screaming with face lifts and tummy tucks (I'm not one of those either). I struggle to find my own path and it's sometimes a rocky one. Far be it from me to find the easy road. That's boring.

In my women's Wisdom Circle we have recently had the assignment to determine what our legacy is to our children and future generations. What will we be remembered for? I look back at my own ancestry and what has come down about the women in it. I know quite a lot about my great grandmothers, but little about the women who came before them. For instance, of Dorcas Woodbridge Bragdon, whose ancestry can be traced all the way back to the Plantagenet line and Eleanor of Aquitaine, I know only that she was born in Maine, went to Pittsburgh with her family as a child and settled on the farm next to my great great grandfather, married him when she came of age, and produced five surviving children. What she was like as a person, I have no idea. Nothing has passed down.

GETTING TO NORTH CAROLINA IN MAY - DETOURED PLANS

This was to be another driving trip. I was set to enjoy it as there would be no threat of snow storms this time and I would be overnighting at my sister's in New Jersey. When requesting my days off from work, I included an extra one before the trip began so I could leisurely pack the car and get an early start on the day of leaving.

The weather was good on this day so I let some of my cats outside since they would be cooped up in the house for more than a week. I was not even dressed yet and just about to get myself organized for the day when I heard cats screaming in the woods that separates my house from the next property. Most of that woods is on my land.  Knowing that Lola (my darling) must be involved, I raced out of the house in robe and slippers and frantically called her name. The screaming continued. There were still cries when I saw Mikie, my young alpha male, slinking along in the underbrush, heading toward home and away from the battleground. Mikie makes love, not war. That meant Lola had no one to defend her out there. I figured it was probably the feral cat attacking her, but there were other, even worse, things it could be -- like a fisher. I had never seen one around but I had heard about them. They are lethal to cats -- their favorite meal. Eagles have also been known to snatch a cat, although since the screaming was coming from the woods, I didn't think an eagle could be involved -- no room to swoop.

WAITING FOR GODOT AND THE REAL ESTATE MARKET

Do you remember that play?  I think it was by Pinter quite a few decades ago. The focus of the play is these guys standing around waiting for Godot to show up. I don't remember why they were waiting for him, but it was certainly something pivotal. They couldn't move forward until he arrived. The kicker is that Godot never shows up. So they've spent all this time waiting and doing nothing. That's symbolic of something.

Well, I feel like I'm waiting for Godot, waiting for a buyer to show up, money in hand, to buy my house in Maine so I can get on with my life in North Carolina. The problem is that my seventy-second birthday is looming ever closer and my plans for my new life involve spending quite a bit of energy. I hope that by the time Godot shows up, I will have the energy to carry them out. Fortunately, my health and energy are unusually good for a person my age so there's hope.

OLDER WOMEN AND RISK-TAKING

As we age, I think many women are more prepared and open to taking major risks in their lives. Our life experiences help us to gauge the level of risk and the worth to us of the undertaking. 

Of course, I do not refer to foolish impulse or ill-thought-out risk of the daredevil variety, or risk that would impact or endanger others. In my research, Gloria Steinem in her book "Revolution from Within," tells of one woman who had always feared flying. She came to a point in her life where she knew it was time to break out of old patterns and she decided that she would conquer her fear and learn to fly. She accomplished that and then applied the principles to her life in general. She found herself able to "solo" intellectually and ended up working on a project for MS Magazine that has helped reduce the reliance by colleges on ambiguous SAT scores when evaluating students for admission. It followed that the validity of other standardized test scores have come into question as well.  AN ASIDE: (I hope our President looks into this before his new education improvement project places an unreasonable and unjustified burden on our teachers and that he discovers the fact that there are many outside influences over which a teacher has no control that influence the outcome of these tests. He's usually very sharp and does his homework on issues and hope he takes the same care with this initiative.)

Some women have turned to an Outward Bound-type experience to overcome old fears and learn to let go of the unimportant. Suzanne Braun Levine, the first editor of MS Magazine and author of "Inventing the Rest of Our Lives," took that route and learned that holding everything together, being in control, isn't everything. Taking charge is about coping with the unexpected. She advises asking yourself, "What's the worst that can happen?" Usually what we imagine isn't what happens at all. 

DELIBERATE CALM

The other day one of the CNN hosts was interviewing a researcher about the qualities of a survivor and this man stated that one outstanding feature was the ability to display "deliberate calm" in an emergency situation. The two cases he cited were the retired doctor whose Prius was running away at 94 mph down a freeway and who -- with the help of a trooper -- was able to bring it to a safe stop on the shoulder, and Captain Sullenberger (Sully) who safely ditched his US Airways plane in the Hudson River saving hundreds of lives.

The host and the researcher went on about this quality of deliberate calm but after some thought, the thing that stood out for me was that both of these men were in their later years. It would be interesting to look at this further to see if there is a correlation.

According to my understanding, deliberate calm is the conscious ability to take a step back mentally in an emergency and enter a state of calm, allowing one to focus on a logical plan of action and to follow it.

The reason I see a connection between this ability and age -- or maybe maturity -- is that I have been conscious of my own ability to remain calm in situations where, not too long ago, I would have been more upset, less focused, less able to cope with a potentially dangerous situation. Most recently, I was on a trip south to see my new old house in North Carolina and was driving this time in order to bring down some tools and household items. It's a two-day trip from Maine and I was staying overnight at a hotel in Allentown, PA.

I was having dinner in the bar there (the only place where food was served in the hotel) and the TV was on to a local station. The talk was all about an approaching snow storm. I had been following the weather reports at my Asheville destination as I had been caught in their unusual blizzard back in December, but had not looked into the PA weather report. Apparently about a foot of snow was expected to begin falling in the wee hours. There was talk of Rt. 78 having been closed in the past due to high drifts. I went to bed with this news in my head resulting in broken sleep.

At 2:30 am I awoke and could not get back to sleep, visions of being stuck in Allentown dancing in my head. At 3 am I got up, dressed quickly and was out the door. The young desk clerk assured me that nothing of any consequence would be on the ground for hours, but I had seen a few flakes from my window. I was on the road by 3:20 am.

The hotel was right off the highway but by the time I reached the road the snow was coming down more significantly. According to what I had seen on the weather map, the Lehigh Valley was in a band that would get the most snow. Harrisburg would receive less, and Maryland and south even less. My goal was to get out of PA before dawn. I had half a tank of gas which should be enough.

There was nothing on the road except me and hundreds of tractor trailers. I was driving at around 60 mph and they were whizzing past. There was construction at one point and traffic was forced into narrow channels. The snow was heavier as I went along, driving straight at the windshield as I hurtled on through the night. The good news was that it was not yet sticking.

I was hyper-alert, sitting up straight, my hands gripping the wheel. But I did not feel panic. In fact, I was conscious of feeling unusually calm and focused on getting through this, and reaching my goal of getting out of Pennsylvania safely. I thought about my cats who depend on me, and all my renovating plans.

In my work as a psychiatric nurse, we sometimes face situations with unpredictable patients that could be dangerous. Our facility is not set up for dealing with chronically violent patients, but once in a while, we get someone who becomes out of control and our job is to bring them safely back into a controlled state -- safe for the patient, ourselves, and the other patients. I have been aware that I now face these situations from a state of calm, forming the steps in my mind that need to be taken, while other staff are becoming hyper-excited, wanting everything done at once.

When I heard the news interview, these instances came to mind. I'm sure I didn't have this ability for calm when I was younger. It would be an interesting part of this study on survivorship and I will be following it to see if the researchers notice the same connection. It it is true that the ability to enter a state of deliberate calm is enhanced by age/maturity, it would certainly be another weapon in fighting ageism.

Jean, Between Maine and North Carolina

THE INSPECTION, THE OFFER AND NEW FRIENDS

It's done. I've confirmed the offer. Just waiting for the sellers to sign the contract then the closing will be set up. 

The meeting with the inspector didn't turn up much that I didn't already know -- I learned that the reason for the sagging corner is a completely rotten beam. But not to worry -- that corner can be jacked up and a new beam inserted. Then the house will be solid as a rock. The inspector, Dudley Wilson, said it "as good bones." I've been saying that all along and it was good to have that confirmed.

Just about everything else was just a confirmation of what I knew and had allowed for in my rehab plan. But now I know the actual floor plan, and Bill helped me measure everything so I could make a good scale drawing. I've already made the new plan reflecting the changes. It's going to be gorgeous.