GOING TROPPO!

 I may have shared this story before, about how The Man and I got to go and live in PNG

 

The Man put a glass of red wine in my hand. “Busy day huh?”

“Yeah, I feel like Alice in Wonderland, you know, that bit where she’s running very fast on the same spot and getting nowhere”

I’d just finished a week of nine to sixes. Sure it was nice starting at nine and not having to rush about in the morning, but the six o’clock finish was always a challenge, especially on Fridays.

There was always someone wanting to be seen “right now”. Those happened every day; but why wait until five thirty on a Friday before deciding that they needed to be seen by a doctor, especially when they’d been sick all day?

It was well past seven before we locked the door behind the last patient

“I don’t want to play this game anymore” I said half joking half serious” Lets chuck the jobs, sell the house and move up to Tauranga now”

“ You’re on” he said “let’s do it” and he wasn’t joking. Suddenly, I wasn’t tired any more. We chinked our glasses together “ Here’s to Tauranga” laughed The Man, and we talked and planned into the wee small hours.

Number one, ring the kids and share with them our exciting decision.

Number two find the best land agent in the area

Number three get a subscription to the local Tauranga newspaper and start looking at property values.

Number four, Chuck the jobs.

Chucking the jobs was the easy part. Then we put the house on the market and began to work out our three months’ notice. We figured that that was plenty of time to sell the house.  We couldn’t wait;

And we aren’t going to wait until we retire to have that orchard up in the Bay of Plenty, we going to have it now.

The land, agent mapped out a plan for us and began to bring in prospective buyers, he left his card on the bench each time. The little pile of cards grew.

I left fresh flowers on the coffee table and cleaned the doggy nose prints off the windows every morning, and the little pile of cards grew.

The agent phoned “You’ve had an offer” he said, but not at the price you want” “ Can’t sell it that low, can you get them up?”

We waited, fingers crossed. “Sorry folks, they won’t go any higher”.

One morning I said to The Man “do you think we’ll ever sell this thing?”

We kept the garden meticulously tidy and still that little pile of cards on the windowsill grew; seven months later the flood of cards had become a trickle. And we still didn’t have a buyer. It was hard to be excited, and we felt like we were living in limbo land.

“The agent phoned this morning” I said “ He wants to come over, he thinks we should lower the price again” We’d chosen a really bad time to sell, property values around us were falling and taking our hopes with them.

“We can’t afford to sell it for any less“ We told him

“Then I think you should consider taking it off the market for a few months”

We felt so helpless. We didn’t want to get back into the rat race of regular work again, and anyway why get a regular job when we weren’t going to stay. We’d both been supplementing our savings with agency work; at least there was plenty of that. 

The answerphone light blinked off and on, off and on

“John wants you to call him” I said to The Man. “And I’ve got a couple of hours work in the morning. Tea won’t be long; you want a glass of wine?”

I sipped mine as I cooked, thinking about my next morning’s work, planning out my day.

“I just phoned John” The Man said, coming into the kitchen and picking up his glass.

“Bring your wine” he said ”Come and sit down. He’s made us an offer”

We talked, topped up the glasses and talked. Tea got cold and we talked.

“Well” said The man at last,  “What do you think?”

“We’re not doing much else are we” I replied “why not”

We chinked our glasses together, “To New Guinea” he said

“Now, How are YOU going to tell the kids?”