When I was a very, very, small child, like maybe four years old, my father took me to one of the old Mom-and-Pop sorts of country grocery stores that people could actually make a living at in those days.
It was a dark and messy place, but it was the 50's, and we were unabashedly hillbillies, so that didn't matter because we were happy enough just to have a store, any store, in which the storekeeper was naive enough to locate on an unpaved road. His emporium carried all manner of staples like Wonder Bread, kerosene lamp wicks, White Mule work gloves, and lots and lots of tooth-decaying agents from gumballs to candy bars. But that's all about the store itself, and, as Arlo would say, "That's not what I came here to tell ya about".
Rather, I want to share an experience that left deep, if invisible, scars on my ridiculous little brain; scars which endure to this day. On the particular day in question, my father was loading up on chicken pellets, penicillin, and fence staples, and since I was along, I knew that I could choose something with which to rot my teeth. I chose a Hershey with Almonds, and took it out to the truck.
That's when it occurred to me that as much as I liked chocolate, there was the undeniable fact that you couldn't blow bubbles with it, so I made the entirely sensible decision to take the candy bar back and replace it with bubble gum, which is what I did.
That's when the situation started to deteriorate, because my Dad was now at the cash register settling up the bill, and the store owner protested that I not only had the bubble gum, but that I took a Hershey bar out to the truck. My Dad asked me about this, and I told him that I had brought the candy bar back in, and put it back where it was on the shelf.
I have always been grateful for the fact that my parents didn't assume I was lying every time a controversy arose, something I couldn't say about many of my friend's parents, or as it turned out, about the shopkeeper who accused me of stealing candy. My parents were also sufficiently generous that I knew I could have had two candy bars if I'd only asked, and my father was a reasonable enough man who wasn't going to get into a fist-fight over a 5-cent candy bar, so I think he paid for both the bubble gum AND the candy bar. (Yes, dear millennials, candy bars used to cost a nickel and the only difference in those and the ones
you pay a buck for today was that they were bigger.)
As with most things that happened when I was four, the details of this exchange went completely over my empty little head, but my father explained to me on the way home that one shouldn't take merchandise out of a store until it's been paid for. He also explained that the old man thought I was a liar and a thief. Worse than that, I couldn't go back and convince him otherwise with my rapier-like toddler logic and deft communication skills. At any rate, when he finally got it through my soft, but exceedingly thick skull, I was mortified, and the whole saga has stuck with me to this day. I still feel guilty walking out of a store without buying something.
Now where was I going with that?
Oh yeah, real estate.
So it turns out that this early neuroses I developed, as well as similar occurrences since, are what have led me, when designing (ahem) the world's first buy-it-online real estate website ever, to put absolutely every aspect of our land deal
in writing. Yeah, that's right, every aspect. Most of the questions I get from potential clients are already answered somewhere on our website, if folks would only read every last word, which, of course, hardly anyone ever does.
But you should.
This Week's Featured Property is Christina's Cove Parcel I: 4.8 acres in Marion County, Arkansas (the mailing address is in Theodosia, MO).
This would be an exceedingly cool piece of property even if the 1,000-mile shoreline of Bull Shoals Lake weren't just at the bottom of the hill below the parcel. (Well, technically, the bottom of the hill is about 200 feet below the surface of the lake, but you probably know what I mean.) The parcel is over 100 yards wide, almost twice that deep, and is covered with red cedar and oak. There's a decided slope down from the access road, the last few hundred feet of which has been dedicated to the county, although they don't maintain it because nobody lives there. It's steep in some places, and rocky all over, so if you don't like those aspects, you'll either need a lot of dynamite or a willingness to make do. When I visited last week, I took a few pictures including some showing a tiny trickle of water which you can rest assured will go dry if it doesn't rain for a few days. What you can't quite see from my photos is that removing a few trees from the front of the property will yield a nice view of the lake. Electricity is right across the road, and we'll give you a Warranty Deed to the property after only six months. To my knowledge, nobody else does this - and it IS a big deal.
