Buying a condo is like watching the locusts settle on your crops, except that it’s only your time that gets eaten, mornings and afternoons stripped bare with contracts and counters, remodels and installs.

We told our broker we were looking for a place with a balcony, somewhere to set out our chairs and watch the last few days of August from. Now the fields of my notebooks are thin and novel-less, while my friend Andrew down in Mexico has a rented rancho fat with word, ripe chapters hanging off every vine.