I had to go back to Ringgold last week, which always turns me sort of inside-out. It’s hard to be where Ken and I lived now that he’s not there anymore. But I had to go because I was finally able to sell the last of the rental properties and the closing was in Ringgold.
It should have been a real celebration to finally not have to worry about rental properties anymore, and I am truly relieved. Ken made a good living for us with his rental property business and I am grateful for that, but I have to be honest and say that the business absolutely drove me crazy. I was raised with a simple philosophy when it came to bills…ALWAYS pay them, and always pay them ON TIME! So the haphazard attitude that most of our tenants had about their rent and water bills just flew all over me. I always thought that most people would pay rent FIRST, because, after all, if you don’t pay your rent, you could end up without a place for your family to live. Well, the people who lived in Ken’s properties paid everything else first (which included Rock-Star Cable TV, a couple of cartons of cigarettes, and filling up their refrigerators with cases of BEER) and IF they had enough left over, they would pay their rent. It was, in my opinion, ABSURD!
Their excuses for not paying rent ran from semi-creative to obviously untruthful, to absolutely unbelievable. In the months just after Ken and I married, the women started showing up to talk to me and give me these sob-stories about how they didn’t have any money to pay the rent because they had no money to feed their babies or buy them diapers. Now I knew for a fact that most of them were receiving Food Stamps and WIC, so there was no reason for them not to have food for their kids to eat. They were less than appreciative when I reminded them of that fact. And when they gave me the diaper excuse, I would pull a bag of Jesse’s diapers out of the closet and try to give to them so they wouldn’t have that excuse. One lady refused to take the diapers because they were blue and her baby was a girl. She had just finished telling me that the only thing she had to put on her baby was feminine napkins, yet she refused to take my blue diapers to put on her girl child’s bottom! She finally ended up cursing at me and leaving in a huff. Once word got around that Mrs. Lunsford wasn’t apt to believe the tales they told, they stopped coming to talk to me. Ken was able to let most of it roll off of his back and not worry about it, but it just made me plain-old MAD!. It was like they were stealing from us and then laughing about it.
After Ken died, it only got worse. It seems that many of the tenants decided that they didn’t have to pay me, because their rental agreement had been with Ken. One guy even tried to convince me that Ken had promised to GIVE him the lot his trailer was on when he died! As if Ken Lunsford would EVER give away only ONE lot out of a whole trailer park. I guess people must have figured that grief would turn me stupid as well.
Anyway, long story short, after Ken died, I knew there was no way that I would be able to keep the properties because they frustrated me so. I struggled with it for a while because Ken really wanted me to keep the properties for the boys. But I finally had to beg his forgiveness and made the decision to sell them. (That, in itself, is another story that I will need to tell one day too. But for now, it still makes my stomach hurt to think about it much, so I will wait ‘til another time to tell it.)
Most of the properties sold fairly quickly. They had not been well cared for by the tenants over the years (especially after Ken died…that’s another part of the other story I will wait to tell), so I had to price them low so I could sell them “As Is”. One by one, they sold until all I had left was the little house that Ken and I had lived in when we were first married. The tenants that were in it when Ken died had been living there ever since Ken and I had moved out, back in 1990, and had been great tenants. They paid their rent every time, on time, and took good care of the place. About a year or two after Ken died, though, they decided they wanted to buy their own house. I tried to sell the little house to them, but she decided that if it was going to be her house, there was too much work that needed to be done on it. Wanted to find something (and did) that didn’t need as much “fixing-up”. I don’t blame her. She asked if I would consider renting the house to her son and his family. I agreed. Unfortunately, her son wasn’t as good a tenant as she had been all those years. He paid pretty regularly for the better part of a year, but then decided to stop paying any bills at all and abandon his family. They ended up living there for about 3 months without paying and finally abandoned the house after I threatened eviction.
So, there I was, with an empty house (in another state) that needed LOTS of refurbishing, no money to do it, and nobody up there who would help me fix it up and get it rented. So, as much as I hated it (I had really wanted to try and keep that one little house for the boys), I didn’t see any choice but to put it on the market too. Unfortunately, about the time I decided to sell it was also when the housing market took a nose-dive and became glutted with foreclosure properties that were much nicer and much newer than my little house. The house sat on the market with very little interest for almost a full year. Several people looked at it and made offers, but the offers were ridiculously low or the people couldn’t get bank financing and wanted me to hold the mortgage for them. Finally, after the last pitiful offer ($20,000 for a two-bedroom house on a level acre-sized lot!), I offered it to Ken’s niece for MUCH less than tax value and she decided to buy it.
I know I should have been thrilled to finally get the thing off my hands…it was only costing me money, sitting there empty. And I was glad to finally be rid of the worry it caused. But it was bittersweet because that little house held lots of memories for me. Ken was living there when we met, so we spent lots of time there before we got married. In fact, it was on those front porch steps that Ken actually proposed to me. We had been somewhere, I can’t remember where, and had just gotten back to the house. We were sitting on the front porch steps, just hanging out. Ken leans over, so his shoulder is touching my shoulder and says, “I reckon we can get married if you want to.” I know it’s not moonlight and roses, but it was so KEN! It is a precious memory, one that always brings both laughter and tears.
Ken and I also lived in the little house for a while after we got married, so it was our first home as a married couple. And it is where Jesse got his start—he was conceived in that little house. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were pregnant with him when we moved out. So, even though I was glad that the house finally sold, the memories made it harder to let go of than the other properties. And just being up in Ringgold for the closing made it more hurtful. But, I went by the cemetery before I came home and talked to Ken about it. When I left, I was peaceful about the whole thing. I wish things could have been different, but I know Ken understands.
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