I was just getting on my United flight to Steamboat Springs yesterday afternoon, after signing the real estate documents to formalize the sale of our home, when the ghost went to work. I had settled into an uncomfortable middle seat and opened my I-Pad to the book I was reading when strange pictures started to pop-up. At first, I couldn’t figure out what they were since I rarely use the “Apple machine” for anything but reading. Occasionally, I’ll consult a website, but normally it automatically opens to the page I just finished. Instead, it randomly showed a slideshow of pictures from our Decatur, Illinois home of ten years ago. That home turned out to be a major hassle to sell and a crippling financial loss. It was a sharp contrast from the ease-of-sale that we just experienced. 

Memories of the good and bad homes throughout my life have been a focus this past week, since we had just put our Portland condo on the market. I was shocked to see these pictures from 10 years ago suddenly appear on my screen, like an unpleasant walk down memory lane. The machine was obviously trying to talk to me with these nostalgic reminders of all the sweat and credit card equity that we put into the house. We had been unable to sell our Indiana home when we moved in, faced with double mortgages made possible by hefty loans from the bank. To make a long story short, as we unexpectedly left the city of Decatur and moved to Austin, Texas, we had to double-down with mortgages once again. It took six long years to finally sell – at half the price we paid for it. Each picture on my I-Pad was a bad memory of money down the drain. The Ghost of Decatur was in my machine.

The sale of the Portland home will now make it possible to finally pay off the remaining mortgage on Decatur. There is still a second mortgage on that house that will continue to haunt me for a few more years. It wasn’t really a bad home, but rather a bad investment; one that I could have avoided if I had simply rented. I will soon be in a position to no longer bear the responsibility of home ownership, and maybe in the future I’ll be able to look at those pictures in a better light? I thought it was pretty mean of that ghost to use my machine for mental torture at a time when I should be celebrating a profitable and quick home sales victory. I will probably just delete the pictures so they don’t pop-up in the future.