Another goodbye. This old house, the one we have loved and labored over for the past five years, is sold and we are looking for a new place to live, spending countless hours exploring our options. We are moving primarily to get closer to health care, but it isn’t just that. There are many people who fight to remain here, in this isolated little town, even when they clearly need to get closer to a hospital and/or access to a grocery store, a home health care aide, or other support systems, but those are people with roots and years of memories and attachments to the place that I don’t have. They have always belonged here.
Sometimes I think I don’t deserve to belong, perhaps that is why I always wind up leaving. I’ve loved and left too many places. Oh, there’s always been a good reason, but still, I wonder exactly why those reasons always seem to find me so easily, almost as though I’m looking for them. Is it because my childhood was a transitory experience, one where living in different places and going to different schools and always being the new kid was a simple fact of life? I didn’t like it, but maybe I got used to it. Maybe that became my normal. Also, there was an element of adventure there, even though, honestly, the transitions were never smooth and I was perennially ill at ease.
My mom moved a lot before her marriage to my dad. My dad moved a lot after serving in the Pacific theater as a Marine during WWII. When they got together they moved a few times before I was born, and then they remained relatively stable in the town where my brother and I started school while they were together. The rented house on Sheridan Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin is the first home I remember. When they split up around the time I was in first grade, all the moving started again, first to an apartment on the other side of town and then we kids were sent to live with relatives across the country. After that we moved several times with Mom and our step dad. By the fifth grade I had lived in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Illinois and had attended five different school districts.
Then they decided to move to Minnesota. We stayed with my cousins there first. Next we moved into a little rental in North St. Paul. I think we were there less than a year, when my step dad came home and announced we were moving again, one more time—the last time—because he had found us a house to buy!
That was the smooth move, even though it meant starting over again in another new school, because it was the one that read like a story with a happy ending. It was going to be the one place we stayed forever. And I walked into that house, so much better than any other house I could imagine living in, and I fell in love. The Winslow Avenue house wasn’t too big, but it was sturdy and freshly painted, with two stories and a fireplace in the living room. It had window boxes filled with blooming red geraniums and a brass door knocker. Elms and maples and pines lined the well-kept lawns up and down the street, and the school was just a few blocks away. I walked to Frances Grass Junior High, and I met my lifelong friend and loved it all. But I was growing up, too fast, and the time slipped away, and I was drawn back time and again to another place, the first place I remembered, and to my father who lived there and to my first lifelong friend.
Meanwhile, the dream house in Minnesota was sold and my mom and stepdad moved to an apartment in Southern California. After that I moved on my own I can’t remember how many times. Minnesota, Wisconsin, California—back and forth. My longest residence was in the beautiful San Bernardino Mountain communities of Running Springs, Lake Arrowhead and Blue Jay, California, a place that I will always love.
And now it’s time to move again. I do love my home and friends here, and my church and library, and the mountains, the beautiful wild mountains and the endless trails. The silence that seeps into my soul. I’m sure moving to a place with nearby health care, groceries, water, trees, and more activities will be good—it’s just so hard to decide on the right place to go, and my heart aches as I can’t move toward my children and grandchildren, only farther away, again.
It’s overwhelming and frightening, and at our stage in life there won’t be much chance for a “do over” if we get it wrong. I think about where my parents ended up, my mom who began her life in Faribault, Minnesota and finished it in a little apartment in Anaheim, California, and my dad who started out in a large apartment in Chicago, Illinois and ended in a small condo in Brookings, Oregon. Were they happy with their choices? What drove them away from their original homes, friends, and loving families? Was it the war? I can only guess. And what called them to the various places they ran to? What wildness, what pain, what longing? Whatever it was, I clearly have felt it, too. Inherited it, I guess.
Feeling lost and looking for solace this morning, I picked up a book—always a good idea—and I came across the following lines. I found them deeply moving. I hope you find something in them that helps you get through your day, too.
“…We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” Katherine May, from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
Best Offer Wins?
“In his witty and thought-provoking manner, Mark Twain once famously said, ‘It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.’” https://www.socratic-method.com
Sometimes, though, truth is not stranger than fiction. And thankfully, sometimes truth is kinder than fiction, too. Recently a friend and I had both just finished books that bothered us in various ways, which isn’t to say books shouldn’t bother us—it’s quite often important that they do—it was just that in the case of these books, the way we’d been bothered had less to do with subject matter and more to do with the marketing expectation that readers would respond positively to the various dastardly deeds of the protagonists, and that, indeed, there did seem to be plenty of readers out there who backed up that claim—readers who “loved” these books (and so maybe by extension that means they loved the protagonists? Maybe?).
I don’t remember the title of the book my friend was referring to; she said it was something about killers who were in love and only killed bad people—sounded like a Dexter type theme, and I know that was a highly watched television series, so I guess there’s an audience for that. I can’t claim to be someone who is above consuming questionable content. I’ve read hundreds of books in most genres and not all of them have been particularly elevating. That said, I have seldom read a novel with a less likable protagonist than the one Marisa Kashino gives us in Best Offer Wins (With the possible exception of Humbert Humbert, the protagonist/narrator of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).
Best Offer Wins is a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and was published by Celadon Books in 2025. From the book jacket: “…Margo will prove again and again that there’s no boundary she won’t cross to seize the dream life she’s been chasing. The most unsettling part? You’ll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief.”
Uh. No. But let me take you back to the reason I read that blurb and took the bait. Coincidentally, on the same day my husband and I were submitting a bid on a house we wanted, Marisa Kashino’s thriller about a woman who will stop at nothing to get her dream house came across my desk at the library. It was a new purchase, and my job was to catalog it and get it ready for patron check-outs. I joked with my realtor that I hoped I wouldn’t become as obsessed with home buying as the teaser on the book jacket hinted the book’s protagonist, Margo, did.
Truth being, in this case anyway, less strange than fiction, I didn’t. Thank goodness. But I did check the book out and take it home to read over the weekend. I’m not normally inspired to write reviews about books I don’t like, but there’s something about this one that pushes me. What that tells me is that I did find it engaging, at least enough to finish it, but that, also, it troubled me. I think I kept reading to see if it would be possible to “root for her even as [I] gasped in disbelief.”
That stage never arrived. The backstory on Margo did indicate she’d had very tough breaks, enough of them, too, and that would normally soften a reader’s judgement and bring her to life in a way that would help the reader to care about her, but Margo’s behavior was so egregious that she remained not only unlikable, but monstrous. And I don’t mean monstrous in the sad way that Frankenstein was a monster because he was a victim and you felt sorry for him. Margo’s kind of monstrous is the carefully calculated kind that lacks any hint of personal responsibility or remorse.
I’m not sure what it says about me that I read the whole book anyway, and that gives me pause. I think perhaps my weird fascination with the book represents a part of contemporary America to me that I don’t understand and cannot accept, but that I still keep trying to fathom. I want people to have homes. I want people to care for each other. I want to love my neighbors as myself.
Each turn of the page offered hope, however slight, that Margo would learn some kind of moral lesson or would offer her a kernal of insight, forgiveness, or redemption, but in the end, there was none. No tenderness. No justice. Just a sad expose of a society where dreams can become as dangerous as despair, and the only thing that matters is the win.
In that way, the book is a success, I guess. A pretty good satire. Excellent social criticism, and social criticism is very much in order these days in my opinion. With Best Offer Wins out of the way, I’m happy to announce that Mr. P and I purchased a delightful home in the beautiful UP—the upper peninsula—in the lovely U.S. state of Michigan. We will be off to a new chapter there soon and leaving the awe-inspiring West and central Nevada behind with love for all we’ve learned and the friendships we treasure. By the way, we accomplished the purchase of the Michigan house without any nefarious activities nor bidding war mayhem. Sometimes, you see, truth is not stranger than fiction, and sometimes it is kinder.
Wishing you all happy days and cozy nights as we move through February and into March. Be Well!
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