From the Desk of the Damned
The heat here is not the interesting part of the afterlife. It's the immediately important part for a significant portion of the day, but that's only because of the immediate need to move away from it before the torture becomes even more unbearable. Assuming, of course, you're allowed to move. Often I'm not.
The interesting part, as much as this mundane and torturous task can be called "interesting," is the paperwork, which arrives each morning already stamped "Urgent" by the Supervisor. I person, imp, minion, being, I still have not seen other than as a shadow in the doorway out of the corner of my eye. And every time I try to look, they're already gone, assuming they were even actually there in the first place.
Today's paperwork assigns me to write about a three-bedroom house in Oneonta, Alabama, built in 1940 and remodeled by people who, to their credit, appear to have known that there is no such thing as perfect, and editing past a certain point is just torturing one's self. Whereas, I was a professor of comparative religion for thirty-one years, and then, following a matter involving a visiting lecturer's honorarium and my own creative edits to who and how it was distributed, I was not. Would that I had the same constraint. Due to my inability to know when to stop, I am now, for a term whose length my supervisor declines to specify, a writer of property listings.
The house is described by its agent as German-style, and since I am not an architect and have only visited Munich once, I will take her word for it. I truly do not know what "German-style" is, and the only other alternative I have is arguing with a description I am forbidden to alter.
What I notice instead is a certain modesty of ambition. Hardwood floors, quartz counters, the primary bedroom and the laundry on the main level. From there it's only one step from a rear driveway. Again, I appreciate the prior owners' constraint. Nobody has tried to make the house into something it is not. The 1940s did not build cathedrals in Blount County; they built houses one could grow old in, and this one has achieved that goal with perfection.
That brings me to Melinda Anderton of Keller Williams Realty Blount, whose listing copy I have read thrice, twice out of a feeling of relief. It is short. It says what the house is, where the laundry sits, and why that matters to a person with knees. It does not promise a lifestyle. Constraint.
In a market that rewards adjectives by the pound, restraint of this kind is a form of local knowledge, and I suspect she has walked more of these streets than the photographs let on. If the phrase "timeless charm" appears, blame the market, which demands it the way a liturgy demands its responses.
Now, as usual, to you, the buyer. You are the couple who will stand in the living room and say "the bones" to each other, as if the house were a patient and you, physicians. You have a saved folder of images titled something like "cottage core." You should already know that a main-level primary suite is not a design flourish but an argument waiting to happen because your relationship is no where near as strong as the roof you're standing under.
You should also know that "remodeled" is a past-tense word, and that the work is done, and that your job is to live here rather than to improve it. I say this with the weary confidence of a man who has read the last paragraph of a thousand essays and found, in most of them, that the student had stopped trying. You will not read to the end of this one either. Very well. The agent's number is at the bottom.
Oneonta was incorporated in 1891, after the county seat was pried loose from Blountsville and carried south to meet the railroad. An early resident named it for Oneonta, New York, and that name is generally said to descend from an Iroquoian phrase meaning "place of open rocks," which turns out to be accurate. At Palisades Park, on Ebell Mountain a few miles out of town, sandstone and limestone bluffs stand over the valley with marine fossils pressed into them, a reminder that this was seabed before it was anything else.
The Horton Mill Covered Bridge, built in 1934 by a fifteen-man crew, hangs seventy feet above the Calvert Prong, the highest covered bridge over any waterway in the country, and the first in the Southeast to be placed on the National Register. The county celebrates its three surviving bridges every October at the Covered Bridge Festival in downtown Oneonta, where I gather there is clogging. I mean, there just has to be, right?
In town, the Blount County Memorial Museum on 2nd Avenue East keeps five hundred research volumes and a thousand family files, which is to say it keeps the receipts. Charlie B's The Lunch Place serves a Southern buffet on 6th Street South that reviewers compare to a grandmother's table, a comparison I have learned to trust more than any I made in print. And Mio Sogno, on 1st Avenue East, serves Italian food at prices a small town can bear, and that's saying quite a bit in today's economy.
(I miss real food. They do feed us down here, but I don't think any of what is on the plate can qualify as "food." Swill would be a better, if still inaccurate, word for what we are forced, often at knife-point, to consume.)
The Sermon on the Mount ends with a builder who set his house upon rock, and the rains came, and it did not fall. Matthew does not say the house was charming. He says it stood. That is the only compliment I am now permitted to pay a building, and I pay it here, in a town named for open rock, with the laundry on the main floor. Call Melinda Anderton. I have been instructed to say so, and tell her that the Damned Professor sent you. She won't know who I am either, but that's ok. I barely recognize myself anymore.
