Home Un-shanti Home

Before we arrived in Pittsburgh, buying a house seemed the only good thing Pittsburgh had to offer. For the price of living in a car’s exhaust pipe in Chicago, we could get Buckingham Palace in Pittsburgh (well, at least in Boondocks Pennsylvania, which is just about 4 hours from Pittsburgh). So we narrowed in on this mansion I was talking about earlier. Chutes from bathrooms to laundry room, intercoms, deck with a slide to the swimming pool, completed basement with a bar and a mini stage to perform puppet shows. It was something I had not even dared to dream about (My dreams don’t extend as far as puppet stages). A kitchen that would make me guilty for not being Rachel Ray. It was 10 minutes from work and close to the airport and mall. It seemed a little quiet and secluded. Isn’t that a good thing for future buyers? So we were about to sign the closing papers, when I got a frantic call from my parents in India.

‘Nahiiiiin!!! Don’t!!!’

Dropped the pen to the floor where it bounced across the hall in resounding horror many times till you get the point that nothing good is about to happen.

‘Why mom? You don’t even have to go out of the house to take your long walks. In fact, we could rent the basement for the International Puppets Conference.’

'Check out Google Earth! This place is in the middle of nowhere.’

Cursing myself for teaching mom how to use Google Earth and knowing very well that this place (like every place in Pittsburgh) was exactly in the heart of some obscure forest, I looked at Google Earth.

Holy cow! The woods that we saw from the deck didn’t end in someone else’s backyard in a few hundred yards as we had hoped. This forest stretched all the way to Alaska and beyond. If a Ted Bundy lived in my back yard, I wouldn’t even know. If he brought his family to our forth room, I surely wouldn’t have a clue till I saw their undies in my laundry. Shudder! Did I mention the hidden attic?!

I do like backcountry and forests, but then too much of a good thing is not good, right? Also the dense perspective from where I was coming from needs to be considered. A aerial comparison of the Chicago and Pittsburgh.

In fact, Google Earth saved us the frightening prospect of buying that house and getting stuck with a mortgage. So instead, we now rent in an equally wooded area with no one in sight for million miles. We don’t have four rooms or a laundry chute or a puppet room. We have an escape route. We continue to pay more in rent for that peace of mind.