I had a moment the other day when I was visiting a property here on the coast. It made me want to pull up a chair and sit down for a spell.
I see lots of different homes and usually I see them so fast that I spend most of my time trying to tuck away one feature that might be special about a particular listing.
Once in a while, even in the heat, or maybe especially in the heat, I get caught thinking about what it would be like to sit and talk with the people who first lived in a place.
The cozy spot in the picture has been around for twenty five years. It started as a raw lot, filled with trees and brush. A lot of hard work made it a comfortable home for a husband and wife who in this particular case took the risk of moving to a place far way from where they spent most of their adult lives.
I know people who have moved lots of time and people who have barely left the area where they were born. I don't know that one group is wiser or happier than the other.
I do know that it takes some courage to pack the the bags and move to a new spot. You have to ride your dreams to get to a new place. Once you are there, the only way to really make it a home is through hard work that may not resemble the dream.
Yet most new comers persevere because going back is not an option. If it is an option, sometimes it is too easy to fail in the new place.
I see lots of folks on online forums, who spend time imagining going some place new. They'll ask endless questions looking for the perfect place, but they really don't have that spark which drives you to actually do it.
They'll worry about hurricanes, but likely never see one except through a television screen. Sometimes they get so divorced from reality that they will send a request that our real estate office will get.
One came in the other day. The person wanted an oceanfront home on property with room for horses near a private school all for under $200K.
While it would be easy to shrug these off as people pulling your leg, I have seen enough to know they are serious in their own detached reality.
Not too long ago someone wrote and asked me about the size of the house on this lot another firm had listed for $57K. As I pulled up the listing, I noticed that the lot was just that, a lot. One of the pictures in the listing had shown the clubhouse in the subdivision and the online looker had assumed it was a house included in the $57K price.
In the end I am thankful for those people who have been willing to try a new place, to hack some of the brush back, to find those secret waterways, and to populate some of the more challenging spots in America.
Without the people who could dream of the beauty and actually have the courage to bet their dollars on finding it, we would be stuck with those folks whose dreams are mostly pie in the sky. We have enough of those in Washington.
I would rather sit back on the porch and talk to those who can dream and have the wherewithal to make it happen.
Somehow I doubt those who are trapped inside their own dream would have a very interesting story to tell. Actually their dreams are often based on the information that they borrow from someone else.
Secondhand reality is not my cup of tea. Somehow I think that trait might run in my family.
