Maxine came to me out of the blue looking for a trans realtor who she could feel safe with.
This key day is a story, I cry as I write this. read on: Maxine came to me out of the blue looking for a trans realtor who she could feel safe with. She had a very condo-type budget but dreamed of owning a little house some day. WE LOOKED AT SO MANY CONDOS. But nothing felt right. All the while I kept secretly looking and looking for her little house with a garden… AND I FUCKIN FOUND IT! A 1 bed house with a giant yard in Oregon City! The woman who had owned it lived there on her own for 40 years with dogs smoking PACKS of cigarettes a day inside.
Maybe us as trans people have a unique skill set of seeing the potential inside something not yet fully created, a vision for what could be, deeply hidden, that has to be believed in in order to be realized. I’m SURE that all the other parties who came through to see that tiny gingerbread house only smelled the horrible cigarette & dog smells & saw only the tobacco stained walls & ripped up flooring, but Maxine saw what I saw: home.
We were not 100% sure this old house could be conventionally financed, so she and I created a plan to work on it so that when the appraiser got there it would be all good, and once she got her offer excepted against all odds, that’s EXACTLY what we did. We put down flooring together and so much more before it was even hers, because we believed that one day it could be. When that key day finally came, she & I burner some tobacco Inside to honor the previous owner, Viviane. I am going to teach Maxine how to tend to the incredible garden Viviane planted, & she will live there alone and happy, just like Viviane did. This is the smallest dollar transaction I’ve done in my career thus far, but it is by far the one I am the most proud of BECAUSE it was hard, because it was against all the odds, because it took two people to feel the same vision of what home could be, what lay beneath, inside a heart no one else could see. Thank you for finding me Maxine, thank you for trusting me.
