Market for my special real estate?

My intangible, non-fungible real estate gives me pleasure. I began investing in it long ago. No down payments. No abstracts of titles. No taxes. They are literally little dream houses built in pleasant non-places. I should give the subdivision a name. Escape Manorettes. The little houses give me the comfort, rest and inspiration I need for a particularly sour, wordly moment.

I like Buckminster Fuller's geodesic design. Notched logs that fit together perfectly at the corners are just as pretty. Frank Lloyd Wright's houses, sometimes built on rock, which gives them a spiritual aura, are ultra tangible and stationary. One has to go, physically, to the site to see them.

Beside the woodland path I walked to school there arose, on one side, a rounded, flat-topped knoll, about 50 feet in diameter. Sour gums, cedar dogwood and serviceberry surrounded it up close and then drifted off into the big oaks and hickories of the surrounding deep woods.

The site appeared to be a place where someone once lived or planned to live. There were two old lilac bushes inside the edge of the knoll. I never found any remnants of a building. Just buttercups, grass, and pennyroyal in the summer; a patch of clean snow in winter, a real fairy-like place.

Daily exposed to it during the school year, I began to think of the desirability of having a little house there.

Delicate, exquisite, ethereal you might call it. It was just a small log cabin at first, with those perfectly notched corners, a fireplace, windows on all sides, with shutters. Essential front and back doors, with windows.

As the years went by, I kept adding little trimmings and extensions. A back porch where I could sit and listen to the great woods that stretched into the blue distance was added.

Then, around the porch I put a bannister with Tyrolean posts! A corner post of the porch was high enough to hold a gingerbread bird house. Outside flower boxes were at all the windows, always full of bright flowers with beautiful butterflies fluttering over them. At the risk of too much description, let me say that tall hollyhock grew outside the porch balustrade, interspersed with blue larkspurs and the native mountain mint. It was my first ethereal piece of real estate; or should I call it un-real state? And should I apply for membership in some classy architectural club or go see a shrink? Never mind. When such questions surface in my mind, away I fly to one of my little houses to be comforted, revived, and beamed up to where I know that we're not treading on the edges of Armageddon.

Other little such mental houses have been, and still are, being constructed according to my needs. There is the tiny, one-room, clapboard, painted blue with white shutters and moss-covered shingle roof. I have positioned it near a river where I can hear the liquid murmuring of the waters as they flow over the river rocks. If saddened by earthly matters, I go, instantly, to the little blue house and let the musical waters wash away the mind wrinkles.

Remember "Jonathan Livingston Seagull?" He was the main character of a book by the same name. The book was very popular and controversial. Jonathan had a number of gifts, one of which was to transport himself, instantly, to another place, maybe half a world away. I thought this was an experimental, fictional "twist" of the author. Now that I can transport myself to places that don't exist, I think more kindly of Jonathan and his creator, the author.

My next little dream house is still under construction. It may have two rooms; one to go and meditate on the gift of imagination, the other to lay out the blueprints.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.