The earthquake
I had already split my world apart and then the earth followed suit
I haven’t reckoned with the earthquake. Not really. I did the appointments with the trauma counselor. Re-lived the moments when the building started heaving, the barefoot race down the stairs past the water lapping violently out of the pool in the dark courtyard of the riad. Again and again until I could recall it without tears lapping violently past my squeezed-shut lids. That helped, I guess?
It didn’t help with the racing panic at sudden sounds, the way my heart lurches from my chest at a loud horn or a truck thudding over a pothole or how I jump from my seat at any of the constant ambush of sounds living in a city. It didn’t help with the awareness born of that long night under the Moroccan moon, the dark fringed by palms and laced with dust from the nearby rubble, the awareness that the primal knowledge we carry in our bones that the earth is solid under our feet is not, in fact, solid at all. It can give way, with no warning at all.
But the untethering began before the earthquake in Marrakech.
I’ve always made impulsive decisions. “You get things done,” people tell me. Maybe that’s waking up thinking I might like to paint the fireplace in my room pink and by noon I’m dredging the roller through Benjamin Moore’s -- is it called Engagement, really?
Or maybe it’s grasping the dancing thread of a thought that we might like to build a house, my husband and I, and turning it into a sales contract to buy a lot I’ve just learned about, and putting our beautiful home, the grand old dame we’d made ours over seven years, on the market. And needing to act quickly to land a place to stay while we build, landing on a little red shotgun house in a neighborhood hailed by publications as experiencing a rebirth. What that really means is houses are cheap following decades of disinvestment, therefore we could fit in a small fixer upper project while building our next home.
In the span of maybe 72 hours I grasped that thread and unraveled my world.
We were under contract on the lot, on the sale of our home, and on the purchase of the house we called Cherry Pop because it was cute before we got stuck.
I like winning. I like winning so much that even when my only competition is me, I push myself to such extremes I’ve had to look at my family gathered around my hospital bed and absorb the sports doctor asking me quietly why I keep doing this to myself. (see: rhabdo)
We’d bought our old house, a ‘crayola nightmare,’ I dubbed it, after it sat empty on the market for a year, for $50 a square foot. Not even that when you count the carriage house across the courtyard. I wasn’t afraid of the behemoth Victorian standing three stories tall and begging for renovations because I’d managed to transform another tall brick house nearly as old in Detroit. That one I took on because I didn’t know any better. Now I was ‘brave.’ Which I’ve found is what people say when they mean they think you’ve lost your mind.
Over several years we made her beautiful. Which wasn’t hard in a house built for a wealthy physician in the late 1800s, a house with a fireplace in nearly every room, a grand staircase, intricate hardwood floors, pocket doors, and clawfoot tubs.
But the house was big. So big. Some 4,000 feet-plus. There were rooms we barely entered. A room where I changed clothes, because what else do you do with a Victorian that doesn’t so much know what closets are? We accumulated stuff to fill it and towards the end I felt like the house was eating me alive. It wasn’t the house, I’ve realized since. It was the stuff. But still, keeping it clean, keeping it in good order, was never-ending. We rented the carriage house and the third floor, and the work with that, the constant fear that something would go wrong (and it did, fairly often), was exhausting. I’d written an article about aging in place. Even in my 40s, albeit late 40s, I was struck with the image of an injury or illness that would keep us from the second, let alone third, floor. A giant house with only a clawfoot tub bath downstairs was no place to call a forever home.
So when the lot in our very own neighborhood popped up on Zillow, we jumped. We listed the house for an eye-popping number we’d never have believed seven years early, nearly triple what we’d paid for it. Granted, we’d poured buckets of money into it with a new roof, gutter repairs, adding central air, a gut job reno on the third floor, fixing up the carriage house, new primary bath and kitchen, overhauling the pantry, painting everything that would stand still. But that was winning to make it worth so much money. To get the sale on my terms: no repairs! no concessions! Full ask in less than three days. I won.
Then we stopped the train in its tracks. The lot had a dozen liens on it. We realized we weren’t talking about or planning the new house. At all. It must not be right, I realized. The closing date passed without a resolution to the liens. So we cancelled the contract.
The Cherry Pop renovation was full steam ahead. And the house was a disaster. Demo day one, thinking we’d expose the brick of the fireplace hidden behind paneling, we couldn’t stop there. The ancient plaster crumbled to the touch. The roof couldn’t just be reshingled; the entire structure needed rebuilding to prevent future collapse. The projected proceeds of our home sale were collapsing into this job. And once you pull the thread, there’s no going back. I made it look fun on social media. Set photos and video clips to whimsical Wes Anderson film tracks to pretend to everyone and maybe convince myself that it would be ok.
I pushed the workers to finish in 49 days from the day we closed. They nearly universally hated me by the end, and also by the end I was handing out hundred dollar bills to hurry them up, hundred dollar bills I thought I could afford because of selling our house and also the moving truck was coming and if they couldn’t unload it the cost would be five hundred dollars a day. Only now that this wasn’t a quick little fixer upper project I didn’t want the moving truck to come here. The street was bleak. The surrounding blocks, mostly desolate, Trump or confederate flags twitching in the Ohio River breeze, then falling limp.
We moved in two days before we were set to close on our old house. We’d already signed our side of the paperwork at a closing with just the attorney, and the out of town buyer would sign after they funded the sale.
Closing day arrived. Nothing happened. Their money wasn’t there. The disorientation and misery at moving somewhere I didn’t want to be shifted in one moment to cold dread. We hadn’t closed. Another day passed. No money. “The wire is coming,” the buyer’s side kept saying. I’ve seen Inventing Anna. Who even were these people? All I knew was they intended to use the house for mid-term rentals. They’d be competition for my own rental properties down the street that I own with my best friend. (I said I like to win, I didn’t say I was smart.)
The next day, still with no sales proceeds, still with both houses, we went to our (now old) place. I’d seen a work truck parked outside earlier. The buyers had repeatedly asked for access to the house. After several of their contractors had traipsed through, muddy boots trailing clumps of dirt on our clean floors in the hour they spent before I made them leave, I stopped letting them in. I texted our realtor. No, he said, the truck wasn’t for our house.
A couple hours later we got a text. A delivery had been made at our old address. We headed over, climbed the steps to the front porch. Where we saw a new lock on the door.
I came unhinged. Called the realtor. He thought we were mistaken. Dude, we know what the locks look like on our house. The buyers’ workers had changed the locks. On every door. They hadn’t paid for the house, they couldn’t give us a tracking number on the wire. And they had locked us out. Stop this, I texted him. I don’t want to sell.
“They’re not getting our goddamn house,” Brian told him on the phone, my husband who might swear twice a year at Lion’s games. Where did they get the key, we both asked. He didn’t know. And the buyer’s agent swore it wasn’t them.
The next morning the wire came. They had our house. They’d taken possession without paying, locked us out, and nothing was going to happen to them. I raged, online and off, about their agent who had to be the one that gave them the key. Until, after days had passed, they finally replied by email. It was our agent, they said, who provided the key, and possession to our house, without our permission or knowledge. I forwarded the message to our realtor, who I’d already parted ways with after we’d moved in, sick of the stranglehold that the industry has on peoples’ ability to buy and sell houses without paying tens of thousand of dollars (see: NAR lawsuit). “They’re throwing you under the bus,” I said, still oblivious. He texted several hours later. “Can I stop by?” he asked. It was 8 at night. No, I said, you can call.
“I need to tell you something,” he said when I answered. “I misled you.”
It was him. It was our realtor, the guy we’d bought our first house from 18 years before. I’d bought and sold everything from that little starter home to the million dollar apartment building that took every penny we had in a retirement account and then some to secure in a purchase with my best friend and business partner. This realtor had been a mentor, a fatherly type that was there every step of the way as I grew up and grew into my passion for renovating homes and for hospitality. He’d lied; sorry, he’d “misled” us, because he was afraid of what might happen, he said, afraid — knowing my temper and penchant for walking away from deals that go sideways — that the whole thing might fall apart. In other words, that he’d lose his commission.
Months later I still don’t know how to talk about it without my hands shaking. We went to his broker, to in-house counsel for the brokerage. They closed rank around him, protecting him when I demanded my commission back, and for good measure, everything I’d paid him in that 18 years. I could no longer trust a single decision he’d made on our behalf. Did he ever have our interest at heart? “Hurt feelings aren’t damages,” their attorney told me. “We do not accept your demands.”
Attorneys I talked to wouldn’t take the case. I got paid, after all. What did I want?
Now I wanted to go after him, publicly. Expose his unethical and illegal behavior. He would surely lose his license if it got out. “You don’t know how somebody might react when you take away their livelihood,” Brian said. “I get a pit in my stomach when you talk about outing him,” my best friend said. Another friend put it more bluntly. “He’ll put a hit out on you if you release that,” she said when I showed her the video I’d made to share the story publicly.
So, I stopped. For the time. I’m still not certain I can give it up.
The buyers had their own plans, meanwhile. The mid-term rentals I’d been told they planned? No. Instead they chopped up this beautiful old home into rooms. Our former neighbors fought them. The city warned them, and they only sped up the work. It’s a historic preservation district with strict zoning laws. We had a hard-earned permit for short term rentals. They, quite literally, turned it into a boarding house, advertising on expedia, my best friend found when he was looking for a room for a family member.
I can’t drive by the house. I can’t see the 8 foot windows that used to flood our living room with light that now open only to a white box, a room where they covered pocket doors.
Two months after moving, we took the long-planned trip to Europe and Morocco with our good friends, friends we’d made when they stayed at our Airbnb at the old house. I’d be gone for a few weeks, staying on after Morocco to spend time in my beloved Paris. I’d added on the time, hoping to heal after the fury and misery of everything that had happened. Paris is the home of my heart, and I’d train around France for a couple weeks, even working in an assignment to write a travel story. Getting away would be a re-set. It would give me the distance I’d need for some perspective. To come back and make a plan. A plan to get out of the place that was leeching my joy, siphoning my desire to do the things I love.
And it was a dream. Lisbon was beautiful, the food amazing. And Marrakech? It was still the enchanting and mysterious place I’d visited a decade ago, even more sublime now. Yet somehow, I cried every day in Morocco. I didn’t know why. I wasn’t thinking about our house, or the move, or about returning to a place I didn’t want to be. Maybe the beauty was overwhelming, I told myself when I had to leave a store full of glinting, shimmering lanterns because I couldn’t stop the tears sliding down my cheeks.
Then we went to bed after a full day of meeting local artisans, a day where I’d crouched on the floor with zellige tile makers in their workshop, trying my hand at creating the tiles I’ve long been obsessed with. From the dark room in the riad I texted my best friend at home, where it was still early evening. He knew well my love for zellige after our own renovation project, reimagining a decrepit old Victorian together where we splurged on gleaming, jet black zellige for the living room fireplace hearth. “I got to make zellige tiles today,” I typed. “I can die happy.”
The words glowed on my phone screen. Why would I say that? I don’t want to die, happy or otherwise, I thought. My finger tapped tapped tapped, deleting that thought before sending the text.
I opened my Calm app for a bedtime story. I’d found years ago that these stories soothe my whirling brain at night, help me actually fall asleep. How perfect that there was a story about, would you believe it, the tile makers of Morocco. The story weaved into my nearly-asleep mind, lulling me into dreamland. My mind couldn’t understand, then, what was happening, what the booming, shuddering, grinding sounds were, why the bed, the room, were tilting as if we were on a ship in a great storm.
You know, I don’t know when I turned off that story. We’d run for our lives, a phrase so cliched as to be meaningless, only that it was real. We ran in pajamas, me clutching my phone, our passports, and, somehow, my water bottle. We ran into the winding lanes of the medina, the air choked with dust, as other people sprinted too, shouting, none of us understanding what was happening until we gathered in a nearby square, away, we hoped, from buildings that could collapse. Our phones gave us the news. Earthquake.
Phone calls home. Frantic, terrifying, racing trips back into the riad throughout the night to get shoes in case we needed to run, then proper clothes, the other water bottle -- we can’t drink the tap water here, a thought that looped all night -- food from the fridge to hand around to the other huddled travelers and local people, cushions to lay on. Desperate searches for information. How bad was it? Would there be aftershocks? Could we leave on the flight we were scheduled to take the next morning, and if not, what then?
The dawn call to prayer after a sleepless night stretched forever. The strands, always haunting to me, but in a beautiful way, now the sounds of what I imagined to be a plea to their God, a plea for the shattered city and its beautiful people. What do you do with your mind when you don’t know if you’ll see the sun rise?
The sun did come up, gilding the Red City, as they call it, in pale golden light. I’d heard the airport was open when some fellow travelers we’d met in the dust made it there. I called every taxi service in town until one finally responded by text. He’d come, he said. He couldn’t get to our square through the rubble so he walked to us, helped us drag the suitcases to where he’d parked, drove us to the airport, jets there plunging into the African sky even as thousands of tiny bottles of duty free treasures lay broken in a million pieces on the floor of the departures hall. Planes bound for safety, to as safe as we could ever tell ourselves we’d be. To Paris where I wandered, lost, for days, somehow unable to find my way around the city imprinted on my heart.
I stayed on as planned, equal parts terrified to travel alone and to return to where our home was no longer ours. Panic struck me on a train when I found I’d gotten on the wrong one en route to Biarritz. I locked myself in the bathroom to try to gain control, to slow my ragged breathing, to halt the hot stream of tears. You’re safe, I told the blurry image in the mirror. You’re ok. I knew it wasn’t true, though, that we’re never really safe, it’s only what we tell ourselves to get through every day.
I returned … home, only that it’s not home. It’s my city but not my neighborhood, not our house. I didn’t know what would be next. Where do we go from here? We’d survived an earthquake but that didn’t impart any life-altering wisdom. I was still the same me, just a very, very shaken version prone to crying easily and for no reason, unable to make simple decisions without dissolving into tears. A stranger in this new place, with nowhere I could settle myself with a walk because dogs chased me and my boy Cash when we tried to go to the little park down the street.
Interest rates are like the Richter scale. A small increase isn’t just a teeny bump on a mortgage. Every quarter point up makes the payment exponentially higher. We’d sold the house we were so fortunate to buy inexpensively and make a beautiful home over the years and in doing so gave up our low interest rate. The housing market, labeled savagely unhealthy in one article I read, is impossible. 80 percent of owners have mortgage rates less than five percent so aren’t selling. Boomers are aging in place and aren’t selling. The few places on the market in the kind of walkable neighborhoods with trees and a nearby park where we’d like to be are priced exactly as they can be when demand exceeds supply, certainly more than a household with one gainfully employed person and one freelance writer who will spend money on travel above all else can manage. Shoddy flips that kill my soul with their grey plastic floors and frightening lack of workmanship flood my zillow feed, and neglected houses in dire need of a full rehab are priced as if the work has already been done.
Shouldn’t we have enough from selling our house to buy something? It might seem like it. But I’d used the equity we’d built with improving the house as a piggy bank over the years, financing a ‘flip’ that lost money, and securing the loan on the apartment building. To sell our house I had to pay down that loan by the amount I’d used the house as collateral. After paying commissions, pouring more into Cherry Pop than we can ever see back, and yes, that dream trip that ended in nightmare and still another to the ends of the earth as I chase … I don’t even know what, we’re left holding a house worth less than we spent to fix it, and a small down payment. At today’s rates that are predicted to never return to earlier lows, there’s nowhere to go.
I cycle through options a million miles an hour, in the span of one weekend thinking we’ll cut our losses and rent an apartment till we figure it out, or buy an RV, or a boat. But our family of two people and two dogs including a 19 year old pup who can’t see, hear, or hold his potty, rather limits the options. I convince myself we can stay here and save money until we can afford something better. Then someone shoots at a cop down the block, or a swat team shuts down the street, or news and police helicopters swirl overhead, or I come home from the store to the coroner and police across the street, or a group of men hiding their faces in hoodies ring my doorbell when I’m here alone, or the police tape off our yard while we’re gone for unknown reasons, the pixelated image on our security cameras offering no clues, or they come searching for intel on a carjacking on the corner, or gunshots wake us at night, and I hate myself for making such a profoundly life-altering god-awful decision to sell our house.
I look at places for sale and hate flippers who throw a coat of paint and new floors on a rotting house and call it a day, fury seizing me at their predatory practice. I hate the realtor who betrayed us so he could pocket a few thousand dollars. Above all, I hate feeling this way. Trapped. Scared. Angry. Woe is me. I want to shake myself out of it. Look how wildly, absurdly, grotesquely privileged I am. We walked away from an earthquake. We have a home. Each other. Health insurance. Family. Friends. The chance to see so many places on this amazing earth. More than I possibly deserve.
And yet I want more. I want to walk my dog to a park, unafraid. I want to look out my window and see trees. I want to take the exit to my home and not see blight. I want to walk to our friends’ homes. I want to stop imagining buildings falling down. I want to feel once more like the earth won’t open under my feet and I want to be in a place that feels like home.
It's very late here and I've been on the road all day getting from Italy to Germany but when this popped up on my feed I needed to read it immediately, knowing I'll reread it again tomorrow when I'm fully capable of absorbing it. I know everything of course but to read it all in chronological order is devastating and at that same time, I know this is you. And the you I know is someone made of stardust and brains and guts and glory. OK and maybe a few nuts thrown in but Dana, you are so special. So special. I'll tell you that as often as it takes. Even at 1am after driving thru the alps in fog. I love you my friend. I really do.