Spring

Spring has sprung in Scituate.  You can see the signs everywhere - FOR SALE.  Yes, the sun is shining, the for-sale signs are blooming and the real estate agents are awakening from their long winter slumber.  Before long they’ll be camped out in their offices, waiting to fatten up on the annual run of summertime suckers from the waterless wasteland west of Route 3.  Like the brokers, I too have awakened from my winter slumber with a renewed sense of purpose.  In my never-ending quest to conform, I’ve decided to put my house up for sale.  I don’t really want to move.  I just want to fit in.

As you can imagine, the hardest part of putting the house up for sale was deciding on a price.  Like both my cars, the house has a lot of character.  The windows are falling out, the roof leaks, and in the winter the dogs huddle together on the couch to get out of the wind. We have storm windows which live up to their name by staging a little storm inside the window every time the outside temperature changes. The exterior color scheme is one-of-a-kind and noone who’s seen it ever has a problem finding the house again.  The house and everything in it smells of skunk and wet dog, and one of the neighbors is so close that we can watch his television without leaving the couch.  On  purely aesthetic and functional grounds, the place is worth more as firewood (20 cords, you haul it) than as a dwelling.

On the other hand, this quaint fixer-upper is on town sewer and using my handy Title 5 calculator that brings the value up to a quarter-mil.  If you stand on top of the chimney and use your imagination you can see Minot Light which makes it waterview, so add another 100k.  And 2 or 3 times every winter, the ocean rolls up the street past my flood-plain neighbors making my house - ch-ching - waterfront.  Add another 100k.  That brings us up to a cool 450k.  Add 50k because I really don’t want to sell, and another 36k to cover the brokers cut.  That gives us our final price of 536k for this quaint, waterfront fixer-upper in move-in condition.  Act now, because I already have a buyer who’s about to make an offer (at the asking price though you didn’t hear it from me).

The other sure sign of spring - YARD SALE - has started appearing, like a fungus, on the north side of all the telephone poles in town.  This is a warning.  I will be having a yard sale and you will all be required to attend.  I have been holding onto all the junk you had at your yard sales last spring for a whole year now and I expect you to take it back (though I will be holding onto the lawn flamingoes and the 50mm military cartridge box for obvious reasons).  For those of you who think you can hold a yard sale then sit back and enjoy a clutter-free existence, think again.  The whole fabric of suburban life depends on the continual flow of junk from house to house.  Should one house fail to take in its share of the annual junk flow the results could be disastrous.  Homeowners all over town would be drawn into a vicious spiral of time-wasting junk rearrangement as they tried to live their lives around the excess stuff.  In fact, historians have recently traced the fall of Rome to one Siplius Mechanicus who, in the throes of an obsessive compulsive disorder, cleared his villa of all junk and for the rest of his long life refused to buy anything he did not have a use for.  Two thousand years later, Italy still struggles to recover.

When I go yard-sailing, I’ll have my eye out for just one thing - the ultimate Scituate lawn ornament - a boat.  My wife thinks I’m trying too hard to fit in, but I feel that if we’re going to live here we have to respect local customs, of which the nautical lawn ornament is the most obvious.  It could be worse.  If we lived up in Maine we’d have to put a ‘65 Dodge Dart in front of the house.  At least a rotting boat won’t leak oil all over the lawn.

So swing into spring with me.  Sell the house, buy some junk and put the boat up on blocks.  And don’t forget to tune in next week when I take you on a fun-filled ride on the El through the swamps of Scituate to the Hingham tunnel.

John Rodley is a local troublemaker.