A New Point of View

Dawn from my Clovis porch

Yikes!

It seems that for a very long time this green metal building showed up in my shots of the prairie sky in Clovis, New Mexico. And why not? It was the first thing I saw when stepping out on my front porch. I kind of liked the expression on its face, especially in the second shot, where it seems to be saying "yikes!" about the incoming weather.

Things have changed, now that we are in a very different part of New Mexico. Now I have a choice of views: The Organ Mountains to the east (this is the view from my pillow--mountains, sky, and city lights!), and Picacho Peak to the west. I like the change, even if my Organ photo is a smeary one--I was so excited to be seeing such a beautiful dawn through that tree branch that I messed up the photo. I'll get better, I promise.

The Organ Mountains: The first thing I see in the morning, and the last at night

Picacho Peak at the end of our road

We're Here!

We had our real estate closing last Wednesday afternoon and finally got the keys to the new house. Ever since then we've been pulling boxes and furniture across the lawn from the garage where they were stored when we cleared out the big truck. In between we pretty much just sit outside and look at the mountains and congratulate ourselves on our great good luck.

We keep promising ourselves a complete day of rest and I hope today turns out to be it. I plan to do more posting as soon as I can drag myself away from the thrills of unpacking.

We finally got our cable/internet hooked up yesterday, so we are no longer feeling so disconnected. I've got lots of photos to share but can't locate the USB cable at the moment. I suppose that means unpacking yet another box. You know how things get when you are moving--we started out so organized, with meticulously labeled boxes. Toward the end there everything seemed to fall apart and chaos set in. In my exhaustion, I labelled a box of baby books and high school yearbooks as "under the kitchen sink stuff."

Any idea where I might find the cables and wires? Perhaps in that box with the fetching label that says baby books/cat litter scoop/tea pots. Oh, dear...

Can't wait to show you my morning walk around the neighborhood!

It's Time to Go!

The adobe house in New Mexico

Over the next several days our family will be packing up more boxes, loading them, attending a closing for this Clovis house, driving the boxes and furniture and cats and dogs down to Las Cruces, attending another closing for our "new" adobe home, then unloading the boxes and furniture and cats and dogs.

In between, we will be smiling and smiling and trying to rest our backs, because surely people at our age should not be behaving this way!

I'll take notes and lots of photos and will be back some time next week to share the experience with you all. In the meantime, just in case you haven't seen it, you might enjoy reading about another old house we lived in: The House on High Street.

The High Street house in New Hampshire

What He Said

Hardly any rubber left on the tires after all our driving

We've been driving hundreds of miles every weekend lately, looking for the perfect place for our retirement home. As a place for my retirement, this home where we live works for the moment. However, Beez will retire in another year and we will no longer be tied to Clovis, with its feedlots and ultra-conservative culture. We just don't fit in, although we have enjoyed our time here. It's been a very stress-free place to live, except for when the conversation turns to gun ownership or politics or religion. I'm sorry to say that it often does.

For an explanation of how we've gotten to where we are, you couldn't do better than to read this post, called Circles, written by our very own Beez with a comment from Auntie Bucksnort, who is certainly involved with us in all these life changes.

How to Become a Gypsy

Before we moved to New Hampshire to find our antique house, we lived on the other side of the country in a little Craftsman cottage in Washington state. We were halfway through a twenty year mortgage with payments of $170 month(!) when a new neighbor moved in. Fate is so fascinating; if this man had never become our neighbor, we might have missed all of our New England adventures.

When R. and his wife arrived, we welcomed them in neighborly fashion with fresh-baked cookies and offers of whatever help they might need. They were nice enough at first, but then things started to change. They got a dog, a cute little female, but instead of treating her with kindness R. would tie her on a rope out behind the house and yell at her. Since he never bothered to get her spayed, stray male dogs, naturally enough, started coming around. Here's the thing--R. would sit on his back porch and shoot at them. 

Our yards were separated only by some wire mesh stock fencing, as we all raised various farm animals in those homesteader-wannabe days. There was that man, shooting a gun just yards from where our small children wanted to play in our backyard and not too many feet away from my little herd of sheep and goats. Reasoning with him didn't help--he would just get excited and start yelling at us, and that's never good a good thing when the yeller is holding a gun. 

What did we do when faced with an increasingly crazy-acting man armed with plenty of guns and ammunition? Why, we did what any librarian's family would do--we got a book. We found the very book that turned out to be the key to our future, one called Safe Places for the Eighties. Yes, as I'm sure you recall, back in those pre-Internet days we needed a book to look up criminal statistics for the United States. Safe Places was perfect for our gypsy selves--we could look on a map to find the points furthest away from R., then check out the town descriptions along with cost of living, crime, weather, and education statistics. 

After all of our research, we settled on New Hampshire. It sounded nice and historical, it had snow, I had visited there as a child and remembered lots of green trees and hills, and it was located halfway between our respective relatives in Maine and Connecticut. Reading up on the various little towns around the state, we took our road atlas and stuck a pin in an area that was pretty equidistant from the three major cities of Portsmouth, Concord, and Manchester. We figured that we could find work somewhere nearby; somewhere that was commutable. I have to admit that once the pin was stuck in the map we looked for the nearest town with the coolest name, and that is how we found a place called Deerfield Parade. 

I hope you are paying attention. You need to understand this method if you really want to become a gypsy. You pick a cute town name on the other side of the country, put your house on the market, and then, and only then, take a quick trip by plane to check the place out. We did so, somewhat surprised that our springtime wardrobes were entirely inadequate for the month on April in New England. (My little cloth Chinese shoes--a color-coordinated pair for every outfit--were a bust in the snow that was still on the ground). You dash back, pack up and take an enthusiastic road trip cross country and--miracle of miracles--find jobs and a place to live and schools for the kids with no problems or stress at all. 

I find myself shaking my head at our younger, carefree selves. 

*****

Two notes of interest: Years later, after we were well settled in Candia, we found that old road atlas with the pin hole in it. The Gypsy Method had turned out to be a good one, as our new hometown was just next door to a town called--Deerfield Parade.

About R's dog: One day, a couple of months before we moved away, R. was away for the day and we watched--cheering her on--as his little dog struggled up and over the chain link fence of the tiny pen that R. had eventually constructed to keep her in. She took off running across the hills and, as far as we know, was never seen in our neighborhood again. R. came home later and pounded on our door, demanding to know if we had seen her. We denied all knowledge of anything. 

I think his wife later did the same thing. I hope he never found her either.

Moving Cross Country

The dogs curled up and slept most of the time, when they weren't smiling



I've been corresponding with some online friends about their upcoming moves to New Mexico--one from Washington State, and one who is coming all the way from Maine, as did my sister a few months ago.

I just can't help it, I get nostalgic for the road trip. Perhaps if I look at a few photos from our trip from New Hampshire to New Mexico, almost a year ago now, I can get over that desire to pack up and drive a long way. These photos will illustrate that, no matter how well you plan and pack, the chaos factor sets in sooner or later. We moved two dogs and three cats, several fragile plants (you can see their crushed remains peeking out from under the shifted load), and underwear. I know I packed underwear, but somehow it ended up in the bottom layer and was unreachable for the duration of the journey.

Some Moving Advice; A Cautionary Tale

[Someone on the City-Data New Mexico Forum asked for advice about moving with "the longest available" U-Haul truck with a car-carrier pulled behind].

***
(Hum the theme song from Indiana Jones here).

I have just one little piece of advice--whatever you do, don't get yourself into a situation with that rig where you have to back up. U-Haul mentions that you shouldn't do this somewhere in the small print and probably everyone (else) in the world was born knowing it. However, we got stuck behind a motel in a parking lot that dead-ended instead of going all the way around and were forced to do a little backing. That was the end of the hitch that was holding on the car carrier. It broke clean off.

U-Haul came the next day and took away the car carrier and I ended up having to drive the car over the George Washington Bridge (New York City) during what surely seemed like rush hour to me.

Now, remember that part in one of the old Indiana Jones movies where Marion gets grabbed by some fez-wearing guys with mustaches in a bazaar and they carry her off in a big covered basket? Indie gives chase and turns a corner to find the bazaar filled with tons of fez-wearing guys with mustaches carrying big covered baskets that look exactly like the one Marion is in... (stay with me here, I'll get back to the U-Haul situation, I promise).

So I'm driving the loaded Subaru and following my husband who is driving the now car-carrierless U-Haul and we don't have cell phones and I'm not sure where we're going and I hate to drive and I hate traffic and there's lots of it and I'm talking to myself and singing through gritted teeth just to get through it all and he gets ahead of me and goes around a curve... and as I make it around the curve, trying to spot him, the whole highway is suddenly filled with U-Hauls that look exactly like the one he is driving.

Long story short, I never saw him again. And dang, he had the cats with him, too.

*******


P.S. Of course, I saw him again, but I thought that other ending sounded better.

Down Here in "Mexico"

My sister is moving here from Portland, Maine and is in her little car with her cats right at this moment, driving across Arkansas. She has had a good trip so far, managing to get out ahead of yet another big snowstorm in the northeast, and hopefully arriving here before a low pressure system sweeps some possible tornadoes through the southern states later today.

Jean made me laugh until I cried, describing a waitress in Virginia who, upon hearing her destination (which J tried to clarify, to no avail), called everyone over to Jean's table. Adjust your ear for a southern accent, delivered in a slightly shrieky voice: "Y'all, come over here! She's moving herself to Mexico! Honey, why're you going to Mexico?" People crowded around, offering advice. One man said he'd been to Mexico, on the same trip when he went to Las Vegas, and they had a blizzard and the desert, all in one trip! More advice: "Now y'all bundle up, honey, the temp is going to dip down to 55 tonight! Hope it's warmer than that in Mexico!"

See One of Our Fifty is Missing from New Mexico Magazine for more of these New Mexico/Mexico mixups. People here often have a hard time convincing folks that we still live in the U.S. When we last checked, we were located right here between the states of Texas and Arizona.