Soaring Ceilings

The house I remember first is the one my grandparents lived in on N. Curtis just south of Lombard. It had a swing set in the backyard and an alley that ran behind it. There were tall ceilings even taking into account that I was all of two foot five - they were tall. We sat in the kitchen at the table at lunch time and when it was time to take a nap I would make the trip up the old wood staircase in the entry-way with the plan to sleep until the hour glass on the TV had come and gone.I locked myself in the bathroom in that house and if you heard grandma tell the story while she cajoled me from the hallway to open up the door I demonstrated my newly learned counting skill and singing skills at the same time. There was the front porch where Uncle Jon and I agreed to say a bad word at the same time and then went and told on each other. I can hear the sound of the screen door slamming as we made a run for it. I loved this big ole’ house first before any others.In my fifth grade we moved to Lake Oswego. It didn’t take me long to make friends because LO was a very friendly place to live. Pretty soon I was spending most of my afternoon’s at someone else’s house. Within walking distance was Heather’s house. It resembled my grandparents’ house only in that it was older and it had something I would later come to call “charm”. Aside from that though, it was different. There as a garage attached to the house and a yard that formed a triangle where the street ended. For years her parents let us write on the wall of the play room directly above the garage where the wall was made from knotty pine. Heather’s house was full of hallways leading to big rooms with walls of windows. It was beautiful and I imagined what it would be like if I lived there.Then there was Charlotte’s huge yellow house with a basement where we had sixth grade make-out parties. Nobody made out until the last 10 minutes when the parents were about the come take everyone home. The rest of the time we did the Time Warp again and again. Charlotte’s house was for kids. There didn’t seem to be anything we would break within reach. A piano welcomed you in and on top of it were pictures of the whole family. In the backyard there was a swimming pool and I still have the photos of the day we swam in the backyard and took pictures of ourselves looking at pictures of ourselves in swimsuits. As I recall she even had a horse in the field next to her house - a site that was only beginning to seem strange as the neighborhood began to grow up around this landmark of a place.There were so many more of them these new houses with new kitchens and intercom systems and garage door openers. Contemporary places with vaulted ceilings that seemed to stretch a half a mile above my head. And there was my first boyfriends four square on Northeast Mallory where the neighborhood came to eat and Ray and Donna’s house in Molalla full of art and flowers and more art.So maybe it was always in the back of my mind to buy my own house when, in the fall of 1992 I found myself recently graduated from the University of Oregon with a graduation present of $1,000 cold hard cash in my pocket. I spotted my old friend Scott Seal’s name in the Sunday paper one afternoon and was glad to have a friendly face to call. Scott was working at his mother’s company Barbara Sue Seal Properties but hadn’t been for long. He found a lender for me and we met at his office and she was able to eke out a loan of $50,000 for the purchase of a house. We looked. We looked every Sunday for two months. I would have bought nearly any of the houses we saw but Scott was the voice of reason. After what seemed like forever, I finally moved into my first house and it turned out to be not more than 10 blocks from the house my grandparents had lived in. This was December of 1992 and I had the worst case of buyer’s remorse I’d ever had. It was like paying a lot of money for a sweater, my mom explained, times 10,000. I was twenty three.  By early the next spring I was struggling in my nine to five. Barbara Sue, who had helped Scott and I write the offer on my little house, agreed to meet with me. What a woman. She said jump and I did say “how high”? I learned. Not very fast but I did learn. Barbara set a standard. No pants for women in the office in those days, no dangling earrings. Suits were required and so were sales meetings where she would educate, inspire, cajole, intimidate, direct and make better everyone who worked for her. I would not have gotten through my first three years as a Realtor without her. I was probably a bit too young to be working as a self employed person. I had no savings, no experience, and no clients. Those were some dark days. I kept a little poem in my file cabinet that ended with “rest if you must, but just don’t quit.”Within three years I would be one of the top sales associates in my office. Within 5 years I would hire my first assistant. Within 12 years I would be working side by side with my own mother at Hasson Company.  A lot has changed in the way real estate is bought and sold. The internet alone has brought searching for homes into the living rooms and offices of buyers everywhere. Now we can wear pants and dangling earrings if we want to. And while prices have changed dramatically – the houses themselves have not. They still hold the memories of everyone who has, is or will live in them.TeishaWritten in 2009