There’s much more that will have to happen between now and the end of November, when we are supposed to move into THE apartment, which we haven’t yet purchased but we’re working on. Inevitably, the dreaded ‘D’ word, one subset of its parent, the dreaded ‘M’ word, will rear its ugly head. Actually, it has already. That’s ‘D’ as in ‘downsize,’ something that shouldn’t happen to one’s worst enemy – although there are a few of the political persuasion here and there that I would gladly send packing ‘down’ the yellow brick road. And so this segment can rightly be entitled:

The Gentle Art of Downsizing

Here’s a tale of woe worth considering, one that happened to a dear friend of ours. She had, stored in boxes, what she considered to be her life – at least, her professional life, everything she felt she had accomplished in her career with no small amount of effort. I never got to see what she had in those boxes. It was too much to keep around the house, so the whole kit and kaboodle was all kept safe and sound in a storeroom near where they lived for the longest time. And then…. somebody else needed that space for whatever they needed it for. And so, her life’s accomplishments became homeless and eventually found its way to a nearby dumpster where all of it came to a sorry end. I don’t know about you, but I feel our friend’s pain. There has to be a more dignified way to part with one’s past.

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‘I just want you to know, Barbara, that this is not the happiest moment of my life.’ We were waiting for Asaf to pick us up and take us down to the office of Immanuel the lawyer in Mishor Adumim for us to do the one thing I was dreading – and you know what that is. How this came about will be revealed below for one and all to consider. It’s a cautionary tale about wanting something not to happen when you know it’s going to happen anyway.

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I don’t understand why you’re doing that. Fair enough. The person doing the asking was sitting in our salon (living room), looking over to the wine fridge next to the window, on top of which sits this ghastly piece of pottery (spoiler alert: whenever we move, it ain’t coming with us), next to which is a tube of hand cream, a package of tissues, and a yellow, legal-size pad with a pen on top. I had to explain why the pad was there and what we were scribbling on it. And why. As I said, fair enough…

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There it was, the eternal ‘which comes first’ conundrum, played out in real time in front of our eyes, here in Ma’ale Adumim, the sleepy little town we call home. For us, the question was which do we work on first, buying or selling, having to do with my least favorite topic, real estate. My position, which I maintained made a good deal of sense – at least it did when I was planting my toes firmly on the ground – was there was no point in putting our apartment on the market unless we had reason to believe there would be some place out there that we would reasonably want to move into. Yes, we could always back out of any deal we agreed to – something that Esther, our real estate agent kept reaffirming – but short of some unexpected ‘unforeseen,’ that wasn’t what my mommy and daddy raised me to do.

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This could be a win-win for everybody. The company sells the apartment, and we buy it. Esther gets her commission, the lawyer gets his fee, and I’m sure you make something on the deal (not that I want to pry!). These remarks were directed at Asaf, who was assisting us in our efforts to buy said apartment (THE apartment on Hashofar) that we were hoping would be the answer, if not to our prayers, then at least to our thoughts. I was sitting next to him as he was driving Barbara and me through the backroads of Har Hotzfim to the offices of the firm that had built and owned the project. We were going to meet with one of their representatives, the hope being that we could come to some agreement that would make everybody happy.

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