A Question of Home

Our back deck, 1996-2019.

JANUARY 9, 2024, MAUI —

“We get to stay here all weekend?” my husband Bill asked me. It was August 2017, a warm afternoon, and we were sipping diet cokes on our back deck, taking in blue sky, tall Pacific Northwest evergreens, and colorful flowers in pots around the yard. So pretty.

“Yes,” I told him. “This is our home.”

His eyes looked up at the space where our second story roof line meets blue sky.

“This house is ours too?” he asked. His Lewy Body Dementia created hallucinations and confusion sometimes. I nodded.

“But… how did we get all this real estate?”

I hadn’t realized till just that moment the extent to which Bill had been traveling in his mind. Over the prior year when he would ask where are we? and I’d say, sweetie, we’re home, he would accept that as truth. Gee, he must have awakened every morning in a different house.

Bill’s question of home that day on the deck was not completely out of the neighborhood. Real estate had been a part of our lives for a long time, even though we didn’t own more than our primary residence. In the 80s, he was an agent in southern California who did quite well marketing himself by sending out dittoed newsletters to neighborhood “farms.” He used to describe himself as the “neighborhood peace corps volunteer” when he would sponsor a plant giveaway or community yard sale. Business, to him, was about service, and he enjoyed helping people find home. Eventually his newsletters became a business and at one time, we had hundreds of clients across the country.

 “I think we should invest in real estate,” I had said to him, in our early years together, more than once. “You know, buy a piece of dirt or something.” Actually, I probably didn’t use the word invest, because back then I don’t think I knew that was what owning property was called.

I had grown up with a father who had rentals, and as a teenager, sometimes spent Saturdays helping Dad with cleaning or painting projects between tenants. But Bill and I were almost always at our financial edge. We lived well enough, paid our bills, had some savings. We did some things right financially, like provide for education, our children’s and our own, but our passion projects always came first. We believed that if we followed our bliss, the money would come.

Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t.

My friend Kailani Jackson (a Maui-based writer and spiritual teacher) suggested to me that when Bill was “traveling” at the end of his life, he was getting a glimpse into my future.

“He had a premonition,” she said. She believed that all those houses he saw were going to be mine. Hey! I like that idea.

I never pushed the issue of buying investment property with Bill back then, because, frankly, I didn’t know how we could swing it. Bill didn’t want to be a landlord, and I was too busy doing other things: working, parenting, playing music. Honestly, as much as we knew about business and real estate, there was even more we did not know, (which I know now, because I have had my nose to the grindstone for a year studying real estate investing). My mom once called me the cobbler’s-wife-whose-children-had-no-shoes, but I think that Bill, who grew up around affluence, saw that more money did not equal more happiness. He wanted to love intensely, write poetry, play music, teach, find Transcendence in mundane activities, and he wanted to be of service to his family and friends.

I have been writing this blog (inconsistently) about reinventing my life for quite a few years now. I’ve done a lot of looking back, and had trouble seeing forward. The good news now is that I can see a future. I’m not just re-inventing anymore, or pondering re-inventing, I am now rehabbing and rebuilding a new life with a new venture in real estate investing. Seems obvious, don’t you think?

Living as a traveler myself these past couple of years has had me thinking about the question of home. Where is home? What makes home? What do I want in a home?  I am excited to keep exploring those ideas, and at the same time, create homes for others while finding new ways to be of service in the world. I get to do that now.

Stay tuned to this space as this adventure unfolds, and I will keep you posted, including ways you can be part of it.

Hey! Let’s make the world a beautiful place!