B.A. has the keys

On Friday, Benedict Ambrose went to a shabby office in Leith and got the keys to our new home. I was (and am) in the USA for work, but thanks to the magic of Skype, I was able to see B.A. in the new flat (or townhouse, as we would call it in Canada).

After getting the keys, B.A. went back to our rented room in the New Town and packed up our suitcase existence. Fortunately our landlord and a strong Boy Scout were on hand to help him carry it all to a taxi cab. At some point in his day, B.A. also managed to pick up a Z-frame bed and the router from the Historical House, a pizza and a bottle of wine. Thus, when I spoke to him, he was beaming with joy, having everything a man really needs: his own roof, a bed, a pizza, wine, and the internet.

The apple tree, he said, was covered with red-and-green apples. He's not sure that they are ready to be eaten yet, however, as it's only August. There's a push lawnmower in the shed and some gardening tools. B.A. had spoken to the neighbour in the lower villa (townhouse), so that she wouldn't be alarmed to hear someone moving overhead.

One or two of my co-workers said it was a shame that I wasn't there when we finally got the place, but I was much happier hearing about it from B.A. than I would have been to be there. When our solicitor told me last Sunday in the church carpark that he thought he could get us the keys by Friday, I felt all the energy drain from my body.

During Mass I had been worrying and praying over what we were going to do when our friends put their beautiful, highly desirable flat on the rental market. We do own a tent, but I wasn't sure B.A. could take the rigors of life under canvas. There are no cheap rentals in Edinburgh in August, thanks to the Edinburgh Festival. We have no family within a decent commute of B.A.'s work, and any friends with spare rooms have boisterous babies or health woes of their own.  We have been living out of suitcases since mid-February.

Thus, when our solicitor told me that he thought he could conclude the business this week, all the planning and fight spilled out of me--through the backs of my knees apparently, and instead of jumping for joy and sharing the good news with fellow trads, I wanted to crawl away and hide. And on Tuesday, after signing the mortgage fifteen minutes before conducting a very important interview, and then conducting the interview, I cried. Cried? Heck, I wailed.

So all in all,  I am happy that B.A. got the keys and took possession himself and that I will have had a whole weekend to get used to the idea before I arrive in our new home. Home, of course, is where B.A. is, and I seem to remember telling him, during some earlier threat to our tenancy in the Historical House, that I would be fine living with him in a tent in the Historical House's back field, if it came to that.

But it hasn't come to that, and I am sure B.A.'s happy grin was inspired, in part, by the thought that we have escaped The Rent Trap. At one point, I was all for telling the seller's solicitor--whose rude emails were passed onto me--to jump in the Firth of Forth, withdrawing our offer, finding a cheap lease near B.A.'s work and starting the house-buying process again later.  However, I knew B.A. wouldn't hear of it because---The Rent Trap! (And also our friends of the beautiful New Town flat, no strangers to the silent-auction agonies of house buying in Scotland, strongly advised me not to do this.)

So tomorrow I will have a new home, and this means yet another NEW BLOG! If I were giving advice to an aspiring blogger who wants to build a large audience, my principal advice would be "Never move to a new blog!" However, I think of blogs as books: once one is clearly done, wind it up and move to another. And now that B.A. and I have been married for nine years, I feel that I actually know something about marriage now, and can start writing, in an intentional way, about it. Also, I am developing an interest in sustainable living, both in terms of finances and the environment*, so I'd like to write about those things, too.

As they say, watch this space.

*Truth is what is. It could be that Judgement Day falls next week or next year, so the problems of plastic won't matter. However, it could be that Judgement Day won't fall for over a thousand years from now, in which case the problem of plastic is really quite serious. The great Canadian philosopher-theologian Bernard Lonergan, SJ, was not entirely orthodox, but he did have very important things to say about being rooted in reality. I am not interested in slogans like "carbon footprint" and "climate change", but I am interested in what really is and what "stewardship" of the earth looks like from a traditional Catholic point of view.  I suspect thrift, discipline and self-denial are all involved in life-giving ways.