This Last House
A Retirement Memoir
Publication Year: 2010
Published by: TCU Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright Page
Contents
Download PDF (44.2 KB)
pp. vii-
Acknowledgments
Download PDF (33.4 KB)
pp. ix-
Thank you, Charles Rowell, for telling me, when I retired, that I ought to write a book about it. Thank you, Deborah Williams, for reading that talky first draft and saying, “It needs more story.” Thank you, Trey Hammond, for reading a revised version of the first draft and finding things in it to praise; ...
Introduction: Finding Prickly Ridge
Download PDF (487.7 KB)
pp. xi-xvi
One January day in 1997 my husband and I clambered up and over a steep slope at the side of a dirt road in New Mexico and stood for the first time on the land where we would build our house for retirement. ...
Part One: Remembrance of Houses Past
Chapter One: The Rock House on Richardson Street
Download PDF (584.7 KB)
pp. 3-20
Orange-brown rock walls. Steep gables. Sometimes green, sometimes brown wood trim. This is the house of my Fort Worth childhood, where I first opened my eyes on the world. This was the start of the trail that would finally lead to the mountains of New Mexico and our retirement home. ...
Chapter Two: All Those Way Stations
Download PDF (997.4 KB)
pp. 21-44
When I married Glenn—that’s what I’ll call him —I entered a life of perpetual moving. Partly, this was because of his enormous restlessness, but also it was just the way things were then.We were a mobile generation. But we were also a house-minded one. Trading up was the paradigm of the day. Our minds weren’t on ...
Chapter Three: Something Completely Different
Download PDF (1.3 MB)
pp. 45-62
The boys reacted to the news in very different and somewhat puzzling ways. Alan apparently hadn’t seen this coming at all. Home for the summer after his first year of college, he went in and out to his two part-time jobs with a deer-caught-in-the-headlights look. Doug, for all his limitations, had been more perceptive ...
Part Two: Moving into Retirement
Chapter Four: Deciding to Retire
Download PDF (315.0 KB)
pp. 65-88
It was Loren who started us thinking about retirement. One day in the most casual way, he just dropped the word—the R word—into our conversation, asking innocently enough, “When we retire, what do you think we’ll . . .” Or maybe it was, “I was thinking that after we retire, maybe we’ll want to . . .” Something like that, ...
Chapter Five: Planning Our House
Download PDF (481.5 KB)
pp. 89-104
Planning a house isn’t just a matter of drawing walls and the location of doors and windows on a piece of paper or a computer screen. These basics are important, of course, as are floor coverings and paint colors and all the other things that go into making a house, and any botched choice along the way ...
Chapter Six: Leaving
Download PDF (88.2 KB)
pp. 105-114
Retiring means leaving. Most obviously, leaving your job, but also leaving the people you see every day. You also leave a pattern of life that has structured your time and energies for a long time, maybe a whole adult lifetime. You leave that pattern without knowing whether you can find another one to replace it. ...
Part Three: On Cerro Espinoso
Chapter Seven: Building It
Download PDF (786.4 KB)
pp. 117-142
From central Texas to central New Mexico isn’t just a lot of miles, it’s a lot of difference. From a work life to a retired life is more difference still. Both retiring and moving to a new place to build a house are major life changes—all the more so when they both come at once. ...
Chapter Eight: Being There
Download PDF (1.1 MB)
pp. 143-180
Our house on the ridge was a fine place to learn to be retired. Once we got settled, our days fell into a comfortable rhythm. I wrote and quilted and read. Loren wrote and built a shed and read. We met at lunch and talked and then went back to what we were doing. The hours seemed as spacious as the high desert country around us. ...
Chapter Nine: People Are More Important
Download PDF (155.9 KB)
pp. 181-194
In 1912, the now revered, but then only aspiring, American novelist Willa Cather made her first visit to the Southwest. Her brother was stationed in Prescott, Arizona, with the Santa Fe Railway, and she went for a long visit with him, hoping to rest up from a hectic six years as editor at McClure’s Magazine and to find a new ...
Part Four: Back in Texas
Chapter Ten: Building It Again
Download PDF (741.8 KB)
pp. 197-214
Now we were not only going to build again, we were going to build the same house again. I suppose that is something very few people ever get to do. You hear people say they wish they could live their life over again and try to get it right—an option not available to any of us, and it’s probably just as well. But Loren and I did ...
Chapter Eleven: At Home in the Limestone Hill Country
Download PDF (274.3 KB)
pp. 215-232
John Graves, in Goodbye to a River, calls this “hardscrabble country.” He ought to know; he lives here. And he’s right, that’s what it is. The soil is thin and rocky, the grass sparse, the brush mostly cedar. Not good country for farming. The earliest white settlers who stopped their wagons here during a sequence of wet years ...
Chapter Twelve: A Place to End
Download PDF (341.6 KB)
pp. 233-240
Only five years retired, and it seems a perfectly natural way to live. My days have fallen into a comfortable rhythm. Yet I know it is not a rhythm that will continue. The time will come—unless something unforeseen whisks me away first—when I will move into yet another phase of life, technically a continuation of the ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780875654447
E-ISBN-10: 0875654444
Print-ISBN-13: 9780875654089
Print-ISBN-10: 0875654088
Page Count: 264
Illustrations: 40
Publication Year: 2010
Edition: 1
