It Will Curl Your Hair...*

Life in West County (as all the towns west of the 101 freeway are known) is never boring. We know this from the time we spent in Sebastopol. My friend Cindy is a realtor, and this morning I went with her to meet a client and look at a house in Petaluma, which was being held open for realtors.

It was quite a new house on a quiet cul de sac with three or four well kept homes and a lovely view of the hills to the east. From the moment we walked in the door there was something a bit sideways about the situation. It. It was well built with high end finishes, but the rugs were dirty, the walls were damaged and needed paint.. And the whole place was in need of cleaning. The realtor rushed up to us to assure us that it was going to be "professionally cleaned" the next day. In the large, well appointed kitchen there were platters of snacks and four young guys in backwards baseball caps lounging around.

There was an odd, somewhat herbal smell pervading the place, and the client who was quite pregnant kept going outside. The penny finally dropped when we walked out onto the sunny deck into a forest of tall marijuana plants in huge pots. The owner appeared to tells about the house, which had been leased since her husband had finished building it in 2008. Apparently the four guys were the tenants who were sticking close to their investment.

As we were leaving someone hustled out the front door with the party platters of snacks, the realtor rushed up to us to explain that they were canceling the realtors' open house and begging us to "look past" the irregularities until they could be corrected. The owners husband was arriving presumably to assess the damages and decide what to do next.

We left shaking our heads and wondering how they could have deeded to hold an open house before they became aware of what the house had been used for.

We had a lovely lunch in my favorite restaurant/bakery, Della Fattoria, and we came home with wood fired oven baked bread, so the day was definitely not a lost cause.

*Vintage salon equipment in the window of a barbershop. No idea what the chicken is doing there...