The selling of a house is a transaction, hardly a transference. The only thing they owe us is the promised price; the only thing we owe them is a house in the same condition in which they’d promised the price. There is nothing in the money that changes hands that tells the story of the family, the children, the home they bought and now sold. The dollars do not tell us of homework done at midnight or sex on the living room couch or whispered fights in hallways or the broken water heater and that very bad Christmas one year. It is just a paper check passed from one hand to another, one bank account to another.

And in return we give you a house, not the home we made of it.