Today I have to make myself go over to the old house and do some work. I dread these trips so much. It gives me an extremely unpleasant mix of feelings—like seeing an ex, when you’re not really done with the relationship. Or, less melodramatically: it’s sucky work at this point (picking through the stuff that piles up under furniture, collecting the last and totally miscellaneous/random possessions, cleaning up areas that are too dirty for me to want the cleaners to see them), and it feels like it’s going on forever. Definitely it would have been better to have listened to all the people advising us to treat it as a cross-country move so that everything happened on one day; but I was not able to manage that, so now we’re doing it this way, and this is going to be okay too. I assume.
And we’re so close to being done, even at our slow, slow pace! For awhile it seemed as if every trip revealed new depressing discoveries. My mom describes dealing with her parents’ house when her parents moved into a nursing home, and how it seemed as if she just kept opening more doors to more areas packed with more stuff, and that’s how it felt for awhile at my old house. But now it is more like emptying out that one last drawer, cleaning off that last shelf, throwing away those last scraps. So if I can just MAKE MYSELF deal with it, it will be DONE and we can move on to the stage where we get a real estate agent to advise us what we should do next.
Specifically, we’re not sure how much work we should put into it—or rather, pay to have other people put into it. What we’re thinking of doing is having the floors refinished and the walls painted and the whole place cleaned. But maybe the agent will say that if we’re not going to do anything to the 1959 kitchen (which we are not), we might as well save ourselves the time/effort/money and sell it to a flipper. Or maybe the agent will say that we would be surprised at how much we could add to the price if we also got the popcorn ceilings taken care of and the cabinets painted. And quite possibly the agent is going to explain what I’ve been hearing on the news, which is that the housing market is extremely affected by this government shut-down and at this point we might as well just hang out until that’s over, and too bad we didn’t list it back when we bought this house.
Oh! I almost forgot to tell you about something that has been RADICALLY HELPFUL for my mood and state of mind! This book:
(image from Amazon.com)
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith. (Don’t read the foreword if you haven’t read the book: it’s full of spoilers.) Miss Grace mentioned it as a book she read over and over again as a child, and it sounded exactly like the kind of book I would have read over and over again as a child (Little House books; Five Little Peppers books; All of a Kind Family; Little Women), so I got it out of the library and I just love it. BUT ALSO: it is about a family living in poverty a hundred years ago, so there are a lot of scenes where, for example, the child is sent to buy six stale loaves of bread at two loaves for a nickel, and the mother makes that bread last all week for meals, and once a week they get a tiny bit of the gristly fatty reject meat from the butcher and that is such a treat. The children collect trash to trade for pennies, which they use to buy broken crackers and penny candy. The mother is trying so hard to save a few pennies every week because HER mother says the most important thing is to try to own a scrap of land you can pass down to your children—but every time the money in the can starts to build up to something, they have to use it for an emergency. They have to move several times, from one grim apartment to another grim apartment. The mother is struggling to see if she can achieve the huge accomplishment of letting the kids graduate from 8th grade before they’ll have to quit and go out to work.
I’ll tell you what: if you are stressing about how much it costs to heat a big old house, or whether the move from one house to another house was a good idea, it can snap things into perspective to read about this level of life struggle. Picturing that mother looking up incredulously from floor-scrubbing to observe how much wailing and fretting I am doing over THIS LIFE I HAVE is…perspective-resetting. I have been reading the book every day for a week or more, and I haven’t had a single panic about my own life. If I start to fret, I immediately think, “We are fine. We are FINE. Look how many pennies we have for candy!”
And yet it’s not a DEPRESSING book. I mean, it is, a little, in some ways. But as with the Little House / Five Little Peppers books, there is more of a feeling of triumph over adversity, and perseverance in the face of hardship. And the book is from a child’s perspective, so to her this is all normal and not depressing. And so often I am thinking things such as “Yay, this means a whole $1.50 more per week for them!!” instead of “Oh no, not another disaster!” Like, do you remember reading books where a child is agonizing over how to spend a nickel on candy, and it would make your heart race happily to read about the resulting little paper sacks of treats? It is THAT feeling, rather the “Only a nickel??” feeling. Combined with the “And we are so lucky!” feeling.
That is my favorite book ever. I still love when she pours her coffee down the drain. What was your favorite moment?
The movie is equally great.
SO HARD TO CHOOSE. Basically anytime they talk about how many pennies something costs, or about getting extra food. And I love the police officer. I love when we get a longer passage of how Katie is thinking something through. I love when Francie holds her aunt’s baby for the first time. And the part about the aunt and the horse who loves her. I love the aunts in general, especially Aunt Sissy. I love the custodian at the new school.
Yooohooo, Johnny!
Oh, and I love the part where she reads the library books in order, and her little cracked dish of candy.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of my favorite books ever. The movie was even pretty good (but not REALLY good). I bet I’ve read it at least 25 times. She has another good one – not as good, but def worth the read – ‘Maggie Now’.
My most often reread book ever! So many scenes that went right over my head when reading it as a child (the condom hung out the window for example) that I’ve enjoyed it just as much as an adult! I can imagine whole scenes in my head. Her book Joy in the Morning is also excellent!
I second Joy in the Morning! It’s about a newly married couple trying to get by on very little money, so it has exactly the same kind of satisfying scenes of “and then a kind neighbor gave them a whole SACK of oranges!” And even though I agree that A Tree Grws in Brooklyn isn’t completely depressing, Joy in the Morning is way happier because they aren’t children, and they’re in love, etc. Highly recommend!
Those crackers the All of a Kind Family sisters would eat under the covers always got me.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was always, always one of my favorite books ever. I have always loved it so much. I cry so hard everytime I read the book, but it isn’t just sad. I also agree that Joy in the Morning is great and worth reading. And thanks to this thread I know the book I am reading to my son next.
Yay!
My book club picked it, and it just so happened to be when I had a newborn and was struggling with nursing and had to pump a lot to increase supply. I put that book at my desk/pumping station just because that was where I could probably read a bit of it 8-10x per day, and I needed to get it done before the next book club meeting. It was magical. I almost looked forward to pumping just to get back to that book, and the tiny chapters lend themselves so well to that kind of piecemeal work, and the subject matter can lift you out of your own doldrums, nursing or house-related. I almost want to gift it to new moms.
I did almost the same thing with Call of the Wild yesterday when I was fed up with snow and snow days. Imagine more snow, imagine temperatures 50 below zero being described at “not too cold,” imagine being an abused dog forced to pull heavy loads in these conditions. Now having the kids home for a day (or possibly two) while you’re trying to work doesn’t seem so bad, does it?
I’m not familiar with this book, so now I’m wondering if it might be a good read-aloud to share with my boys who are in 2nd and 5th grade? (Age 7, close to 8, and 11.)
I read it for the first of a thousand times when I was about 7. There will be parts that go over the 7yo’s head, but not in a bad way.
I am planning to read it to my 8 year old boy, but I think I need to hold off on my 5 year old. The 11 yr old should be able to even read it by himself
It’s a great book, I loved it so much.
Oh, I loved the All of a Kind Family books. I’ve never read A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, but now I will check it out.
I’m interested in what your Realtor says – we interviewed 3 different Realtors when selling our last house (we were obligated to because we were being moved with a relocation package) and I was shocked at how different their assessments were in terms of what we should do to the house & what we should list it at/how we should market it. We ended up going with the most conservative person (in the sense that she had us list the house for a lower price point)…and then sold for over what the aggressive person wanted us to ask for…but in our case, the conservative Realtor pointed out that the biggest challenge for our house was going to get people in to actually see it – once they saw it, they wanted it, but it had a couple of negatives, namely a relatively busy street & small bedrooms. So she wanted it to show up in search results for people with a lower price ceiling. We ended up with a bidding war…
My instinct for you would be to refresh paint in neutral colors and leave the floors and kitchen alone. This is mostly because I have heard too many stories of people investing a lot in their house only for it to be purchased by a flipper or torn down. But neutral paint is cheap & never a bad thing.
Love “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”! I’m right with you, it was a favorite along with the Little House books and All of a Kind Family. Since you liked it, I also highly recommend another book by Betty Smith, “Joy in the Morning.” About a girl named Annie, just turned 18, who leaves Brooklyn to marry her sweetheart who’s in at law school in the midwest. Lots of money struggles and “how will they manage?” great story, very cute newlyweds and marriage issues, and she finds a passion for writing.
This comment section of other people who love this book as much as I do is extremely uplifting to my soul.
Oh, yes, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn! So wonderful. I read it for the first time as an adult, but I would have LOVED it as a child. I read the All-of-a-Kind Family books over and over, and I learned a lot about the Jewish high holidays and tenement living! I remember distinctly that the shop owner kindly rebukes the girls for wanting to buy a quarter penny’s worth of candy to make their change stretch. And dusting for buttons (or even a PENNY)! All the heart eyes.
I only found out near the end of her life last year that my grandmother had grown up in extreme poverty and had had to leave school to work full time at a smelly fur factory to contribute to the family income at age 12 (I think she finished grade 6?). I knew she’d been neglected and her mother had had to scrape to get by, but I hadn’t really understood the scope of her situation. I would never have guessed because she was smart and very well-read, and she got a great job when she was in her 30s (after standing up to her awful husband and divorcing him) working for an airline and ended up travelling the world.
I would never do a kitchen remodel to try and sell a house. The numbers on the return for those remodels range from 60 to 80% – which means that you lose 20-40% of what you spend. Plus the time. And – worst of all – the aggravation of dealing with bids, workers and getting the thing done. I say set the price so that it will sell in the condition that it is in (after a major scrubbing) and move on.
We sold the condo that we bought for our oldest to live in while she was in med school a few years ago. It was on the market with other condos in the same complex that had the HGTV trinity – stainless steel appliances, hardwood floors and granite countertops. We asked around $15K less than those. Adding the trinity would have cost us at least $20K. It was under contract at asking price within 10 days. So – we saved a lot of time and irritation and were at least $5K ahead. The right realtor will know this and will be able to set the price correctly.
Oh how I loved that book! I only ever read it as an adult (“read” it via audiobook in the car). But it’s been a few years and I really want to reread it, this time in paper.
That feeling you’re talking about reminds me of The Boxcar Children, where these poor orphaned children (maybe, I can’t really remember the specifics) are living in a literal abandoned boxcar of a train and they are so excited to find, like, a discarded spoon in the woods, and a little chipped blue cup at the dump. And instead of feeling horrified that these kids are eating out of TRASH, I felt really pleased by their ingenuity (they cleaned things with sand, I think!) and determination to make the best out of their situation.
YES The Boxcar Children!! They use a stream to keep their food cold!! And the eldest works picking fruit! And they dig through the trash and they treasure every useful item they find! And they use broken pretty things as decoration! And I ENVIED THEM SO HARD! It sounded LOVELY! If I remember right, the eldest sister bossed the younger ones in a motherly way, making everyone bathe in the stream and wash their clothes and help with dishes and gathering berries and so forth.
Ooh, I am jealous of you reading that for the first time! If you like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn I recommend the Melendy books by Elizabeth Enright- the first one is called The Saturdays. The family isn’t poor, but it’s set during WWII so they are dealing with scarcity and there are four kids. Very satisfying, and with similar themes of independence/positivity/food descriptions/supportive sibling group.
Yes, The Saturdays!! and The Four Story Mistake!!
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is my all-time favorite book, and I also read it countless times as a child. I agree that the “making do” parts are so satisfying, but I also love the parts as Francie gets older–her diary, her graduation (which is the part that always makes me cry), her various jobs. It’s just so good.
Also, I am dealing right now with pretty major life issues involving my ex-husband and his parenting time. He has a substance abuse problem, and I’ve thought a lot about both Francie and Katie in that context in a reassuring way.
I very rarely comment but had to chime in to say that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of my very favorite books and I am nursing my own little Francie, named for the book, as I type this. I’m so glad you read it and loved it.
omg, Five Little Peppers! I was obsessed with them! I need to get the actual books again, but they are free kindle downloads I think. LOVED these books!
I’ve re-read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn so many times, I couldn’t even count them for you. Seconding the recommendation of the Elizabeth Enright “Melendy” books (The Saturdays, The 4 Story Mistake, And Then There Were Five, and the other one whose name I can never remember)
Your post reminded me of a post I wrote nine years ago about re-reading the Long Winter
OOOH, NOEL STREATFEILD! Her Shoes books, particularly Ballet Shoes and Theater Shoes, are terrific “dealing with adversity” from the childrens’ point of view. They’re cozy and delightful. And they’re back in print.
Ballet Shoes was made into a movie. Read the book first.
I LOVE A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. What a great book that was. I didn’t read it as a child, I think I was in university when I read it. I wish I had read it as a child because that was exactly the genre I loved back then. I love it now, too.
I am putting this comment here for the book association, though I’ve always meant to read a Tree Grows.
I think you enjoyed Lincoln in the Bardo, once you got the flow of it? I keep thinking about that with this book, Milkman by Anna Burns. Only this time, instead of Civil War era ghosts, we have a teenaged woman who likes to read and walk through 1970s era Northern England city. And she’s being stalked by a paramilitary renouncer of the state. It’s dystopian-historical and grim but she and her family are so charming and scrappy that I love them. It’s work to read, but wow. She really explains her inmost thoughts in a way that reminds me a bit of this blog!
Oooh, that sounds good! I put in a library request!