Noah's Wife Reads the Realtor.com Listings

It's a climate change/catastrophe winter break, in terms of my reading.  I zoomed through Ian McEwin's What We Can Know--in some ways, it's a literary mystery, but it's set in the future, after various climate catastrophes have changed the coming 100 years.  Yesterday, I started Joe Mungo Reed's Terrestrial History, which also travels back and forth in future years.  Both books are compelling in so many ways, and I'm so happy to find myself consumed by real reading again, not just doomscrolling.

Of course, the doomscrolling habits are hard to quit.

Those of you who know me, either in person or through this blog, know that climate change/catastrophe is never far from my brain.  This morning I read this article about German scientists sound the alarm about the apparent speeding up of warming--we might be to 3 degrees of increased temperature by 2050, not by the end of the century.

You might say, "Wait, I thought we had agreements that would allow us to avoid these outcomes."  Well, yes, if we actually did what we all had agreed to do.  And frankly, even with those agreements, followed to the letter, we'd have been cutting it close.

This morning, I found myself entering our South Florida zip code into Realtor.com, and scrolling through.  I'm always on the lookout for our old house to reappear.  This morning, it wasn't that house, but two houses across the street from our old house.  Hmm.  

And then I searched for the house itself, which is listed as a place we could rent for just $5,295 a month.  Are there really renters who can afford such a rent?  It's an apartment.com listing, so not a short term rental site from what I can tell.

Perhaps there are not renters who can/want to afford this rent.  It's been vacant since August--and probably before that.  It's been off and on the market since we sold it, and I don't think anyone has stayed there much.  It was listed as a short-term rental, then for sale, and now as a longer term rental.  I scrolled through the pictures and felt a bit of sadness at all the updates that we did that have been ripped out or covered over.  I have fallen into this pit of despair before, and always, there is this voice in my head saying, "Honestly, Kristin, you were lucky to escape with most of your possessions and a profit on the house sale."

And along with that voice of reason this morning, my muse chimed in, with her gentle reminder that I am writing a series of poems in the voice of Noah's wife (yes, the Biblical Noah who built an ark).  I am still working on it, but I am pleased with this vision of Noah's wife consulting the realtor sites and wondering if they made a mistake even as she is sure that they are safer now.

What a lovely way to salvage the spiral that the Realtor.com site often inspires!