The people who make cars make them in silver and black and white and red. Most of the cars on the road fall under one of those four schemes. Is graphite a dark silver or a faded black? It doesn’t matter. Those people who make our cars also make them in purple and orange and yellow and bright, Mountain Dew Green. The people who make jelly beans make them in raspberry, cherry, lime, and strawberry. They make mixtures of those, too, like strawberry-lime and raspberry-cherry, the latter of which is more than likely to be simply called Double Berry because it’s more marketable. Those people also make salty popcorn jelly beans, and dour anise ones.
There’s a nice house with vinyl cladding on the side of that popular interstate. I mean, it’s not popular because people like it, but if you thought that people drove on certain roads in great masses and at the same time, and you thought that doing so made a road popular, then this road is as popular as they get. Big semis with Canadian license plates like that road, too. They particularly like it late into the night and early into the morning, when they engine break even though the signs clearly tell them not to. That house that shares a backyard fence with that wide road is $319k.
There’s a house a ways away from there, in a nice subdivision with trees and grass and mailboxes with names on them. That house, it has cedar on its exterior walls, and the end of that cul-de-sac backs up only to some trees. A distance farther into those trees, there’s a wetland, and while there are some mosquitoes that dwell there, it’s generally considered to be a very nice swamp. This home is in the township next to the interstate, but it’s on the other side of the township- the side that borders that Preserve, not the side that borders that great concrete vein. The house with the mailbox and the deck and all those trees is listed for $319k.
In the sixth grade, my friend’s grandparents had a home in Florida. My friend went there every winter for a week. He came back to school tanned with stories of pools and palm trees and alligators and for at least some time after his return, he wore a shark tooth around his neck. His grandparents must have lived on the ocean, I figured, in a great big house with a great big boat out front. In Florida, there are lots and lots of homes. It wasn’t until I visited Florida some time after the sixth grade that I realized Florida was not all alligators and palm trees and ocean-side mansions. It was also inland deserts and scabby swamps and trailer parks. Lots and lots of trailer parks.
These Florida homes are available all over, and right now there’s one with a tile roof and a small backyard pool listed for $279k. That’s a nice house, and it’s in Naples. Not the nice Naples where the glamorous people shop and dine, but Naples nonetheless. From this home, you can drive to the airport in 30 minutes or less, or you can drive the other direction and find the beach in 10 minutes. You can drive to window shop on that famous shopping street, and you can dine waterside, assuming you’re not golfing in a cart of gulfing in a boat. This is a nice place, Naples.
Farther north a long ways, there’s a town. It’s in Florida, but it’s not close to anything except Orlando. There are pools there, and golf courses, and scabby swamps with some alligators and long-legged white birds. There’s a house there, too, and it has a tiled roof and a small backyard pool. It’s listed for $279k, and it’s fine enough. The owners decided to paint it the color of a Florida sunset, so it’s mostly orange with some yellow on the eaves. There are some restaurants in that town, but one of those is Waffle House, so I suppose there are really only two other restaurants. There’s a theater, too, and if a movie releases on October 25th, that theater is sure to get it sometime around Christmas. The golf course there is simple, straight up one way and then straight back, again and again until 18 holes are completed. The carts are gas, but there’s a rumor that they’ll be getting four electric ones for next year.
Today, I was going to contrast sales volume on Geneva this year over last year, and then compare that to the Delavan Lake market over the same two tenures. I started looking at some of the Delavan sales, and I couldn’t imagine, not for the life of me, why some of those homes sold. One in particular struck me in the way that that ugly baby struck that doctor on that one Seinfeld- breathtaking. It’s a good thing we all like different things, otherwise there would be no one to buy that house near the interstate. There would be no one to eat the popcorn jelly beans and drive that purple crossover hatchback. There would be no one to buy that house in that no-name, land locked Florida town, and there certainly wouldn’t have been anyone to buy that breathtaking lakefront on Delavan.