House For Sale (Must Act Quickly!)
Lizzie Simon
Word Count 823
Over the past decade, the view from my grandmother’s deck in South Wellfleet has become only more and more awesome, in the true meaning of the word, as storms and erosion have knocked down the two homes in front of it, and the land beneath them, into nothingness.
On the deck, surrounded by the roar of the sea, shifting winds and tweeping birds, one senses that our deck is just going to get more and more beautiful until it is gone. Are we safe and stable for fifteen more summers, fifty more summers, or is this our last? No one knows. Anyone with eyes open to the weirding world would say anything is possible.
My mom and her younger brother have owned the home since my grandmother’s passing fifteen years ago, and I do not believe they will ever sell it. It isn’t because nobody would buy it. Our neighbor to the side sold essentially the same house as ours last summer for 2.4 million dollars. It’s a truly bananas number for a 700 square foot dwelling with no heating system, and a kitchen smaller than some of my friends’ refrigerators.
My grandmother bought this cottage as a widowed social worker and mother of three in the 1960s. There’s still a little picture hanging on the bedroom wall that I made for her. “Hi Grandma I just want to tell you I love you” it says in black marker on cardboard with shells glued to the four sides like a frame. What kind of glue lasts forty years? No contemporary glue stick has the strength of its ancestors. The septic system has hung on even longer, which means that outdoor showers are vigorously encouraged, and flushing anything other than “TP and HUMAN WASTE” is vigorously demonized, on signs my mother typed up IN ALL CAPS and taped up in the bathroom.
I have a lot of history there - some truly great writing sessions, some truly questionable “romantic” choices. Needless to say, the universe-to-pen connection is very strong in the cottage. Have I ever been depressed there? That seems impossible. I am in love with the mornings. I am in love with the nights. I also love the period between the morning and the night and between the night and the morning. It’s amazing just being there, tuning in to that wild ocean roar and the air’s gentle sing songy sweetness and all the shiftings of light as the day ambles along to its finish.
The cottage behind ours belongs to the children of a deliciously literary and provocative social worker /activist, who died last year at the age of 91. I can still see her, tiny and engulfed in a bright Marimekko summer dress and gigantic sunglasses. The last time we spoke, she was dishing out a wild and implausible bit about a woman we knew, saying that she’d spent the winter trading sexual favors in the beach parking lot with police to be forgiven for various humiliating minor crimes. I must have looked a little confused; I think I was just caught up in my head about how much sand can fly in your face and hair in the howling winter winds. I mean there’s a reason we all board up our windows, until my neighbor interrupted my train of thought and took down her sunglasses to look me in the eyes: “I’m talking about blow jobs,” she said. That wasn’t the part I couldn’t figure out, but OK!
Her wonderful daughter was the one to tell me that our neighbor’s house was in contract. She’d also heard that the buyer was a “familiar face,” but no one quite knew what that meant - a local person from town? Or the opposite, a celebrity?
What is the psychological profile of a person who will spend millions on something that will certainly disappear? Is the buyer a fool who visited the area, fell under its spell and neglected to read up on all the houses that have been falling down into the dunes? Are we looking at an arrogant climate change denier? Or maybe it’s someone with extreme wealth, the type of wealth for whom losing money means nothing? Or a buyer with a profound spiritual practice, who wants to be deeply in nature, awake with his nose pressed to impermanence?
On the beach my relatives and I kicked around some celebrity names, folks we thought might make great neighbors, and the next morning, Wallace Shawn, Pamela Adlon, Wanda Sykes, Andrew Scott, Sarah Polley and Blake Shelton come to mind. I’m sure they all have beach houses already and I hope they’re enjoying them immensely.
I hope, famous or not, that the buyer is bookish and tells me salacious things, things that make my head spin, things that make me laugh involuntarily. That’s the kind of fun I’d love to have out here, gazing into the end of the earth as it makes its approach.
Lizzie is a screenwriter, developmental editor and the author of a mental health memoir, Detour (Atria Books). Her Substack, Lizzie's Letter, is a weekly delight of humor, solace, observation and recommendation.