Tree Farm: An Excerpt from Fight Like Susan

04.1.2016 | 1:01 pm

An Accountability Note from Fatty: Today I weigh 170, which is up a pound from my last weigh-in. The reason why? Because when I worry and stress, I tend to eat, almost out of weird kind of spitefulness toward my better instincts. And right now, as I work on this very difficult writing project, I am reliving a pretty remarkable worrisome and stressful time. Which is compounding with the stressful and worrisome time I’m having in the present.

That’s all just excuses, though. It’s still me making the decision to  buy myself a Dunford Donut Milkshake at Arctic Circle. So. I’m going to be better. I promise.

I am doing well on my exercise commitments, though. yesterday, I did a particularly brutal TrainerRoad workout: Lamarck. Forty minutes of this one-hour workout are spent at your FTP, giving this workout an intensity factor of 0.91. I have to say: I’m pretty proud to have completed it. I need to do a new FTP test soon; I hope and suspect that it will be going up.

The book…well, I haven’t written as much as I would have liked to. This is partly because I’m also chasing down job leads, and that takes time (and has to be a priority).

And sometimes, it’s just very difficult to go back in time. There’s a lot of pain there still, and while it’s worth writing about, it’s not easy.

So, for this excerpt, I decided to give myself a break: talk about something that is very much a positive memory: searching for and buying our house in Washington.

Tree Farm: An Excerpt from Fight Like Susan

Here’s a practical tip I hope you never find need to use: don’t go house hunting while you’re undergoing chemo. It’s not fun, and it’s not practical, and your real estate agent is unlikely to be enthused at all the vomit you leave in the backseat of her car.

But Microsoft had given us this rental house for just a few months. We needed to find a place to live, and we needed to close on it before Susan even finished chemo.

And so my friend David Lazar — another Microsoft guy and cyclist —recommended a real estate agent to us, and we started shopping. Driving around neighborhoods in Sammamish, looking at houses we could afford.

Susan was torn about whether she’d come along for each of these outings. On one hand, she really wanted to be involved in choosing the neighborhood and house. On the other hand, we’d be sitting in the back seat, getting tossed around as our agent drove us from house to house.

I would get queasy; Susan would get truly ill. To the point that sometimes when we did arrive at a house we wanted to walk through, Susan felt unable to get out of the car. So I’d go through the house while she rested, with the promise that if I found something I thought she’d really love, I’d come back and we’d re-walk it together.

I never saw one good enough to have her walk through. Not the house that smelled of dog urine. Not the house where the owner sulkily walked behind me the entire time. And not the house that was on a lake…but was three stories tall.

OK, actually I did have her come into the three-stories-tall house, because I just couldn’t help myself. “You’re not going to mind having to go up and down two flights of stairs whenever you want to get to the bedroom for the next three months, are you?” I asked.

“You’re funny,” Susan said. “So funny.”

We went to dozens of houses, most of which were beautiful and large and just a few years old (or sometimes brand new). But while they were nice inside, they felt so cramped outside. Which just felt wrong: to live in a beautiful green place like Washington, but have a house that was packed as close to other houses as the law would allow.

And then we visited Tree Farm.

Tree Farm is the neighborhood you expect all of Washington to be. Tall evergreens almost completely obscuring the sky. Blackberry bushes thickly covering any space they weren’t actively fought back. Windy narrow roads. Big yards, with enough trees between every house that you felt like your house was alone in the forest. A winding walking path through the extensive wooded that surrounded the neighborhood.

And a restrictive covenant for the whole area that guaranteed that all of this would remain just as it was.

“Here. I want to live here,” Susan said, before we even arrived at the house the agent was going to show us.

And I agreed.

The First House

There was a problem, though. We were not the only ones who had discovered Tree Farm. Houses that went up for sale there generally sold instantly. Unless they had a big problem. Like, if roof needed to be replaced. Or there were a crazy number of stairs. Or the wood was rotten. Or there were holes in the walls.

Which pretty much described the house we looked at — the only one for sale in Tree Farm. Nothing that couldn’t be addressed, except for the minor issues that Susan was dealing with chemo and recovering from her surgery. And I had a new job. And we had twin toddlers, both still in diapers. And our boys were reeling from being moved from the only home they had ever known.

There was just no way we could add a house restoration project to all that.

But we kept coming back to the house, parking close to it, and taking the kids on walks on the little one-mile wooded path that went through the neighborhood. The kids were amazed that they could just pick and eat blackberries right off the bushes. And there were frogs and fish in the pond. And we could watch as, over the course of a few days, a woodpecker completely decimated a dead tree.

We knew fixing up this house was beyond us. But we also knew this was neighborhood where we wanted to live.

So we stopped looking elsewhere, and I just took to driving through the Tree House neighborhood, road by road, every day as I rode my bike home from work.

The three months allotment Microsoft had given us in the rental house ended. I called the person who recruited me to the company and begged for another month in the house. She said yes, but just one.

I kept riding through Tree Farm every day.

The Second House

And…then I found it. It wasn’t a gloriously beautiful, big house. In fact, it was quite small. But there were four bedrooms: one for Susan and me, one for the twins, and one for each of the boys.

And it was all on one floor: no stairs for Susan.

There were quail and squirrels running along the backyard fence. Frogs on the deck. Raccoons in the trash cans.

And there were two fireplaces: one in the family room, one in the living room.

And there were more evergreen trees than you could possibly count, including one pair of trees right in the front that seemingly fused together, forming one massive canopy that covered the front yard and much of the roof.

The grass in the yard never had a chance against that kind of shade or that many pine needles.

It didn’t have air conditioning. It didn’t have an office space. It didn’t have much storage space. It didn’t have overhead lighting. We didn’t care; we’d figure out how to take care of or live without all of those things.

Within 48 hours, we had made an offer. Within two weeks, we began to move in. This would be the place Susan finished her chemo, and then we’d have the cancer behind us. I had a great job at a great company. We had a good house in a dream neighborhood. We planned to make Tree Farm home forever.

And you know, maybe it would have been, under different circumstances. Because there really were some wonderful, beautiful things about where we lived and the time we shared in Washington, in that house, and — especially — on the paths in the neighborhood woods of Tree Farm. This house, in fact, is where my best memories of our time in Washington are centered.

But there was also a lot I just didn’t understand about how chemo would affect Susan, and how this house would be part of that. A lot I didn’t — maybe couldn’t? — prepare for.

And to be honest, there was a lot I just simply did wrong.

PS: If you’re enjoying these excerpts and want to support me asI write this book, please pre-order a copy of the book and buy any of the very cool jerseys, shorts or bibs, socks, bottles, hoodies, or t-shirts that go with the book. Thanks!