House Shopping

I am house shopping with the required Buyer's Agent, also a fairly tolerant friend of mine. She likes to drive although not gifted with any sense of direction, until we hurriedly arrive, then she beelines into the ubiquitously requisite lock box as if by smell. Meanwhile I visit current occupants, the trees first and foremost, then bushes flowers, occasionally, to my grateful surprise, an entire garden, or even just one vegetable, a tomato plant, a humble gang of shaded herbs. I ask them how it is here in their home. I like to taste their soil for signs of pregnancy but who knows what contaminants might fester here. And my real estate agent, although a friend, finds it unseemly for me to put my mouth around what I probably won't buy. She, too soon, coaxes me away from my greet and meets with shade-givers and grasses, the edible and ornamental neighbors of the "big house," to explore the darkness of plumbing and electrical systems, attics and basements, kitchens and bathrooms... Her list of boring things to look at and too often smell in a bad way feels endless in comparison to too brief introductions outside, speaking with, listening for, hoping and faithing and loving with any signs of life among these large majority of property historians, co-investors, cooperative care-givers and receivers. Eventually, it becomes our time to aimlessly wander around in search of yet another lock box on our life For Sale list. I say goodbye to the trees and shrubs, my occasional edible and more popular ornamental hosts, far too soon to ever learn if they would choose me or not to become with them. I feel like I do on election nights when winners and losers are announced by statistical projection before votes are actually counted from all us co-investors; and long before registered voters have listened to trees still standing in our yards, on our farms, in our fertile forests, to learn their quieter discernment of which candidates produce more healthy cooperative outcomes and which more toxic competitions within these diversities of Earth's wealthy nature.