Even if I didn’t let the cat out of the bag (metaphorically, of course), you would all figure out that what I’m about to describe didn’t actually happen in real time in the real world as we know it, where the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. It must have been a dream or a half-waking state – as when it’s 4AM and Pooms, the senior cat, has realized that her food bowl is empty or she needs her neck scratched – and we’re pulled from our bed and called into duty.

What I imagined is that I was standing on a step ladder going through the shelves of one of my bookcases, trying to winnow down my collection of novels to a manageable few. There I was, holding a copy of The Cornish Trilogy, three novels in one volume, by the Canadian novelist Robertson Davies, when I found myself in the following conversation. It was as if I were talking to the disembodied voice of the writer – which on sober reflection couldn’t have happened. (He died in 1995.)

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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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‘Do you want that for here or to go?’ I get that question every time I order something at Power Coffeeworks because the barista du jour is supposed to ask. I invariably look at the coffee server in amazement and feigned shock. ‘Where else would I go?,’ I respond with my own somewhat rhetorical question. Should I wander the streets of Jerusalem clutching my take-out container and intermittently sipping the world’s best coffee? Can you imagine walking into your favorite watering hole and ordering whatever it is you order: a beer, a glass of wine, a cocktail, and being asked if you want to take it with you? In this particular case, I had an even better response. ‘Ellie, if I go outside in this heat with my iced latte, it will soon be a watery lukewarm latte, and who wants that’?

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I know – I JUST KNOW – that there are folks out there waiting on pins and needles for the continuation of my stirring and evocative saga, The Dreaded ‘M’ Word. We had left off with Asaf (the correct spelling of his name) holding the key to the front entrance of this new building on Hashofar. We were about to walk up the flight of stairs (I guess the elevator was not yet in service with only one apartment actually occupied) and open the door to apt 6, which might or might not become the future home of the Casdens. So what were you thinking? What did you expect to find? We know that apartment hunting is not your idea of a good time – to put it mildly.

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There’s no way I can prove it, but I KNOW, I just KNOW, that was not the way it’s supposed to work. At the Shabbat kiddush we were considering mishtaken mechir, which I didn’t even know existed until a few weeks before. This is a program that allows young couples to enter a lottery, the winners being able to purchase their first apartment somewhere in The Land at a substantial discount from the market value. I try, as much as possible, to discourage discussions about real estate (or anything else that might raise my blood pressure), but, in this case, we were discussing Economics, and that’s allowed (anything under the rubric of ‘social sciences’ is fair game, even politics – although American politics is by invitation only, show your credentials at the door or remain forever silent).

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Imagine if they had started when they said they would. Of all the different building projects put up lickety-split in our part of Ma’ale Adumim when the city was nothing but a collection of barren hills, by far – with no fear of competition – the worst, the ugliest, the ones that have most been defeated by the passage of time, are the buildings right across the parking lot from our own humble abode. They really need to do something with those buildings.

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