Smell of Bread Before the City Wakes
04.04.25 The Friday Footnote: Housing inventory is up, are we in a balanced market? A clip from Friends, and some quiet, random thoughts on purchasing a cane.
Some notes on pain, work, and the quiet of becoming
A couple years ago, I walked into a board meeting wearing my cane. It was more a gnarled walking stick with a simple knob at the top than a traditional medical cane, so it wasn’t an unusual thing when the new board member noticed my cane. I always tried for a bit of flair with my canes. The last thing I am is boring, so everyone was always noticing my cane. But the new board member was much older than I and took not boring to new heights when she asked me what my cane’s name was because, as she said, she had owned many canes in her lifetime, and she had named them all. Or rather, they whispered their names to her. I have never in my life ever named a cane. But I have needed them, off and on since my twenties.
And I’m a little bit miffed because yesterday, I purchased a slick, slate black metal walking cane from the Walmart. A sufferer of chronic pain is a difficult thing to explain to people when one day you have a cane in your hand, another day you are strolling through the streets like a rock and roll king, and other days you bring the cane just in case. People tend to think you are making stuff up.
I first knew something was wrong when I took an early morning gig at Rapid Express Delivery (RED)—a kind of UPS knockoff. We started our morning shift at 4 am. And that was my favorite part of the day, that commute from my little double apartment on Clinton Street and the drive downtown Columbus, Ohio, to the warehouse because you would drive with the windows down and smell the warm yeast coming off the Wonder Bread factory. You were the only vehicle on the freeway, and the entire city smelled of warm bread before the full day dragged on with the later scents of exhaust, grain dust, and beer. Deep fryer funk, gyros, and sticky waffle house meets falafel-cart energy. Rock salt and wet denim. Grilled meat, asphalt, hay, livestock manure, and sometimes a bit of funnel cake. Wet worms, thawing mulch. The promise of mowing season and front yards exploded into gasoline-tinged chlorophyll. You could still catch hints of farmland just outside the I-270 loop.
But inside the loop, Columbus smelled like a city growing inward—folding itself into bread and beer and burnt coffee, unsure if it wanted to stay a college town or grow into something meaner. And in those early 3:30am morning commutes, it was just the sanctity of warm bread. Like a heavy ritual.
Inside RED, we stood between conveyor belts and trucks backed into loading docks. We were taught how to jigsaw stack the boxes, but to keep up, we mainly just threw the cardboard haphazardly, and when we knew a floor manager was on their way through, we built one nice straight wall to hide our mess. One of the workers beside me caught his hand in the conveyor belt, and that tore the skin right off to his first set of knuckles. The floor manager told him he could go to the hospital if he wanted, but he wouldn’t be coming back to a job after he was released from the ER. We parked our cars a mile out from the warehouse and had to go through two security checks to get in and out. After our shifts, we’d pull into a local UDF or other convenient store and buy a few six packs, sit on the hoods of our cars at that early 10 am before lunch hour. It was just that kind of place to work at.
All of my fellow employees drank because the work was hard, sweaty, unrealistically fast-paced. And when you finished one truck, another backed in to take its place. The floor managers walked on wire planks above the belts and would constantly scream at you for doing something wrong. Those beers were cold and hard won, but I wasn’t drinking because of the work. I drank because the walk from my work back to my car took eons to walk, each step with searing, shooting pain.
I spoke to my doctor about the pain. I was too young and too inexperienced, too stupid to know better when he informed me there was no way I could be in that much pain—that it had to be all just in my head somehow.
The last cane I owned—before the one I purchased at Walmart yesterday—I brought with me on my last vacation, a family Christmas, a short, brief sojourn return to Ohio, where the cane rolled underneath the hotel bed and remained. So for almost a year, instead of purchasing another cane, I held onto walls and handrails. Balanced myself on bookcases and at tables. My surgeon, when doing my assessment, asked me to stand on one leg, on the bad leg, and I hovered near the exam table, grabbed hold the crinkly paper like somehow that was going to save me from falling.
“Yeah,” the surgeon said. “We’re going to do surgery. And after, you won’t need the cane.” So this brand new cane is a temporary item in my life. Not anything I’ll own long enough to learn its name. And the last of the pain shedding, the final, slow, well-fought eclosional moment.
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The Bare Bones Numbers 💀📉
New Hampshire housing finally starting to loosen its white-knuckle grip on inventory. We’re up to 3.09 months—the highest since Peloton stock made sense to a seller with a Zillow estimate walked away with a two-pair win, thinking, “Yeah, this market’s never cooling off.” We are starting to hit that early-stage normal zone, where buyers get more choices and sellers no longer have the house advantage. Median prices held firm at $489,000 from last week, though homes still move in just 7 days. So, don’t confuse more inventory with more time.
We’re not in a feeding frenzy anymore, but this is still a high-stakes poker game. If you’re buying, don’t be surprised to find your Realtor sneaking a secret Ace up your sleeve. And if you’re selling, price it right, play it clean, and you’ll still rake in the pot.
📍 Statewide New Hampshire Housing Market
Active Listings: 1,335
Closed Sales (Last 6 Months): 2594
Pending Sales: 649
Median Sales Price: 489,000
Median Days on Market (DOM): 7
Inventory: 3.09
Affordability Index: 79.00%
📍 Seacoast Area
Active Listings: 230
Closed Transactions (Last 6 Months): 480
Pending Transactions: 159
Days on Market (DOM):
Highest: 137
Average: 16
Median: 7
Pricing Trends:
Lowest List Price: 135,000
Lowest Sold Price: 115,000
Average List Price: 736,015
Average Sold Price: 733,959
Median List Price: 587,700
Median Sold Price: 590,000
📍 Tri-City Area (Dover, Somersworth, Rochester)
Active Listings: 41
📍 Durham, Newmarket, Madbury & Lee
Active Listings: 6
📍 Portsmouth & Newington
Active Listings: 30
PROPERTY OF THE WEEK
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Estimated payment: $3,908/mo
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