We have tenants.
That sounds ominous, doesn't it? I'm reminded of the Far Side cartoon where a doctor says, on seeing spotted cow heads sprouting from his patient's neck, back and knee, I'm afraid you've got cows, Mr. Farnsworth.
Tenants are a very good thing, a thing worth celebrating. A buyer would have been even better, but despite Irma's complicated reasoning about why the Obama family, Oprah and any celebrity who'd even flown over Illinois really owed it to us to purchase our Chicago house as a Midwest pied-a-terre, no buyer surfaced during its nine months on the market.
I've been a tenant many times, and I'm a tenant now. I think I'm truly a renter at heart, and I don't know if I'm capable of ever hammering a nail to hang a picture without a pang of is this okay? Being a landlord feels very strange to me. I'm learning a lot about how we live vs. how other people live, and what our particular threshold is for disrepair compared to others. For instance, the ice maker in our freezer never worked in the Chicago house, even though it was new when we moved in. Naturally, LB and I bought ice from the corner store on an as-need basis. We never considered another avenue, but then, I learned to drive on cars that needed intense counseling and perhaps exorcism before repair work could even be considered. And LB grew up in a house where flushing the toilet required safe-cracking experience and a generous perspective on what constituted "flushed."
It's a little embarrassing that our tenants assumed the ice maker situation was a new problem as opposed to a given. On the other hand, we initially found it odd that the toilet in the boys' bathroom of this house ceases to flush at all when it's below zero outside. There's nothing stopping us from calling a plumber about that toilet, but our first and only instincts have been to pour large pots of water into the bowl while simultaneously praying for warmer weather. We're good tenants that way.







































