by G. Sax, @gsax

No photo today. Nothing visual other than what is triggered by what you read.

Ever left a place and then returned? Years later. To the same spot at about the same time of the year.

Perhaps a timeshare in Ocean City, Maryland earlier in the season than most arrive. The Atlantic Ocean, with its rich, frothy salt smells enlivening your nasal passages, is solely yours.

The annual trip with "the girls" to Palm Springs, California. You don't realize how much you miss the desert breezes until you are taking in the aroma of your oversized glass of Pinot Grigio mingled with the scent of firewood burning from the glorious outdoor fire pit.

Are you a hunter? Then it's that favorite field at the start of deer season when the air is crisp and silent and…

Perfect.

I enjoy the smell of Halloween in Saint Paul, especially in March.

Hear me out. My kids and I pinned last Sunday's late-March evening to October 31 just from the smell. Changing seasons, changing temperatures, changing earth.

Where some feel the cruel trick of allergy, I am allowed to be purely absorbed by springtime folly.

It got above 70 degrees yesterday, so I went for a run down to the local park. Quick background: I lived in my current neighborhood as a kid. I moved away for 20 years. I moved back. Now I wander the same streets and pathways as a full-fledged adult that I did when I was breaking curfew.

Marydale Park was hopping yesterday with families, dog walkers, loiterers, and runners. That's a big deal for the home park.

I noticed the extra bustle, but what I was particularly keyed on was the smell of trees budding and swaying, a lake newly unfrozen, and grass growing. Each intake of air brought me back 20 and 30 years. Smell is a great transporter if you let it.

What great smells evoke time and place for you?

I was in a home this weekend with a  decor was from the 60's, 70's and 80's.  It brought back some memories. The owners are really into collecting things and just about all the furniture has flowers on it as do the window treatments and wall paper borders.

Sometimes dated decor can reduce the value and saleability of a home.  I say sometimes because there are some things that are timeless but flowered wall paper is not one of them.  The owners lived in the home for more than 40 years and I understand why they might not want to take the time or go through the expense of redecorating but there is one thing they could have done  that wouldn't have cost them any money and would have made the home more attractive to buyers.

They could have removed the family photos that were on every wall and put away the nick knacks that were every where. My clients liked the house but they spend a lot of time looking at the photos on the walls and kept commenting on the spoon collection, the plate collection and the statues, the paintings and every thing else.  It was hard  for them to stay on task and look at the house. It was hard for the potential buyers to imagine the rooms with their own furniture in them.

All the little treasures that have been collected over a life time and the family photos can make rooms look cluttered and they distract buyers.  They will need to be packed up for the big move any way.  Once they are gone it is easier for buyers to imagine the home with their own belongings in it. They need to have that mental picture before they can make an offer.

When I look at the room in the photo I can picture it decorated any number of ways. I can see the floors and the walls.  It is too sparse for most peoples taste but I would rather have a room be a little too sparse than cluttered. It is easier to imagine things in a room than it is to mentally take them out.

 In recent weeks the inventory if homes on the market in St. Paul has risen which is a good thing because in January and February it started getting hard to find the right home for some buyers.  As I looked at all of those new listings, we have about 400 more homes on the market here in St. Paul in March than we did in January I started to wonder if they were being absorbed by the buyers.   

Absorption rates are a  calculation of how long it will take for all the homes on the market to be sold, or absorbed, at the current rate of sales. I do love numbers, and these are in months, the data used came from the RMLS, (MLS) and is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.  Sadly there are no guarantees in life.

The absorption rate for the last thirty days for St Paul is:

5.58 Months

Sweet! That means that as the homes are going on the market and up for sale buyers are buying them. How long will this last?  Hard to say.  Applications for new mortgages were down in February and in some parts of the country home sales were down as well but not here.

There are more homes for buyers to choose from but the best deals are being scooped up quickly as buyers race to beat the clock on the first time home buyer tax credit which expires on April 30th.  

For some very local real estate numbers . . and we all know real estate is local check the Local Market Conditions & home prices category.

The picture has nothing to do with the post and I blurred his face just because I can.  I am hoping someone claims this child and tells him he should not be playing with his skateboard so close to the "No skateboards allowed" sign on Chestnut Park Plaza or he might get shot. . . with a camera of course.

BY Jack Boardman

During the fifties, mostly when my age remained in the single-digits, time passed by very slowly; even during the long summer months, when I'd actually look forward the school year beginning. That is, until it actually began.

Saturday morning TV was a mix of cartoons and westerns; Roy Rogers & Dale Evans, Wild Bill Hickok, Buffalo Bill Junior, Annie Oakley and reruns of old Republic “B” Western movies. I was quite the little cowboy in those days, complete with stetson and a brace of nickel-plated cap guns.

Our summers were spent outside alternately playing baseball & cowboys; it's funny, but no one wanted to play the outlaws so we'd have to take turns. Come to think of it I sort of enjoyed taking the well-aimed bullet and performing a rather involved drop to the ground: “Yuh got me, Sheriff! Ahhhh…”

Summers then as now also meant the family vacation; and ours was no exception. The problem with ours was; I was simply bored to tears with fishing.

One summer we went to the Black Hills in South Dakota; I of course brought my stetson and six-guns. We visited Deadwood, where James Butler (Wild Bill) Hickok met his unfortunate demise at the hands of Jack McCall. I could never watch the TV western in the same way again.

Beginning in 1955, I would spend two weeks at Aunt Florence's farm in Pine County; well, more correctly, my Uncle Cecil's farm. Two-hundred and twenty acres of red clay & rocks; suitable only for dairy farming and raising sheep. The farm was fully a third forest and marsh. There was no television or telephone; no central heating, no indoor plumbing and only an AM radio tuned to WCCO to stay in touch with the outside world. Needless to say there was no internet!

There wasn't even a tractor; my uncle had a pair of the largest horses I had ever seen, Wanda and Queenie, the horsepower of the farm. Over the course of several summers I became quite the young farmer; after the death of one of the horses, my uncle reluctantly purchased a tractor and it was on that tractor I learned to drive. I learned how to shear sheep; milk cows by hand, shoot a rifle, fell trees for firewood & fence posts, set a fence-post and pull the barbed wire tight.

I learned something else years later about the benefit of visiting the farm, not for me, but for my parents: They could go fishing without some bored whiny little kid who hated fishing.

(A few years ago I visited the farm, now abandoned, the photo above is the farmhouse they lived in. It was kind of sad for me to see the farm so run down.)

Every now and then I get something in the mail that isn't a bill or an advertisement. Last week I got a free copy of AIA Guide to Downtown St. Paul by Larry Millet.   The book has some photos of mine in it so it was a trade.  They got photos and I got a book and after looking the book over I think I got the best end of the deal.  The AIA guides are published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press and are filled with information about local architecture and history. They have other wonderful books too. I have quite a collection and have enjoyed them and learned from them all. 

This particular guide will make a great resource for the condos that I list and sell downtown.  I like to include some history and background with my marketing materials.

The book is a walking tour companion complete with detailed maps published in cooperation with the American Institute of Architects thoroughly researched, meticulously written, the book features more than 125 architectural structures. The book doesn't have pictures of all of the buildings that are in it which makes me want to go out and take pictures of those too. In the tradition of Larry Millet who also wrote "The Lost Twin Cities" the book has pictures of buildings that no longer exist.

The Mississippi River has been the number one tourist attraction in St. Paul for the last several days.  By Tuesday police and park personnel decided to block off some of the river access so that people would not fall in.  It costs the city less money to provide the staff to keep people out of the park than it does to pull them out of the river.

According to the numbers I am seeing from the national weather service the river crested yesterday at 18.48 feet.  It will be several days before it is back to flood stage and below.  The picture is of the bridge that connects Raspberry Island to Harriet Island and is the only access by land. Raspberry Island is not under water it is just smaller than it used to be. Some high water in these areas is common in the spring. It was just a little higher than usual this year.