I bought the rental property on Clover Street in 2019, which was the year I also stopped pretending I was going to retire on my teacher’s salary alone and started doing something concrete about the gap between what I had and what I would eventually need.
The decision to buy a rental property was not impulsive, though it looked that way to a few people who knew me. I had been thinking about it for three years, reading the books and the forums and talking to my friend Patricia who had owned rentals for fifteen years and who had the specific pragmatic knowledge of someone who had learned everything through direct experience rather than theory.
Patricia said: the property will teach you things school cannot.
She was right about this in ways I did not fully understand until later.
The house on Clover Street was a two-bedroom ranch, built in 1961, on a lot that was larger than the house required, which was one of the things I found attractive about it. The previous owner had maintained it adequately rather than lovingly, which meant there were things to address but nothing that was structurally compromised. The bones were good, which is the phrase everyone in real estate uses and which is also simply true, the way certain true things become clichés because they are useful.
The backyard was large.
I want to establish this specifically because the backyard becomes the whole of the story, and to understand what happened I need you to understand what was there before.
The lot was approximately eighty feet deep behind the house, which is more backyard than most people in this part of town had, and the previous owner had done nothing particular with it except maintain a lawn. There were two old oak trees in the back left corner that were significant enough to have their own presence, the kind of trees that have been in a place for so long that they seem to have preceded everything else and will outlast everything that comes after.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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