This Last House: A Retirement Memoir

Introduction: Finding Prickly Ridge

I n t r o d u c t i o n Finding Prickly Ridge 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. Past the roadside embankment, the lot sloped more gradually uphill toward the back, to the crest of a ridge. It lay in that elevation band of the Sandia Mountains that means piñon and juniper trees, in addition to rocks and cactus. Lots of cactus. We made our way cautiously up the slope to a clearing where we turned around and looked back. The realtor’s car parked on a flat slab of exposed rock at the side of the road seemed far below us, and the house we had glimpsed on our way up—across the road, where the land dropped away toward the east—was now visible only as a rooftop. On beyond the drop-off, in a dusty lavender haze, lay the wide expanse of the Estancia Basin. We knew at that moment that we had found the place we wanted to be. It was cold and blowy with a hint of sleet in the air. Even Diane, the realtor, who was used to the climate and better dressed for it than we were, hugged herself in her parka. “Two-and-a-half acres, you say?” Loren asked. “Right. Two point four seven.” That was a little smaller than we had thought we were looking for. (We were then entertaining a fantasy of keeping goats.) Even so, we both knew this two-and-a-half-acre site was what we wanted. We xi looked at each other and lifted our eyebrows. Loren’s face bore a look of elation. “We’ll call you when we get back to Texas,” he said. That was so we could talk before making an offer. But on the plane that afternoon , all the way back, I kept worrying that somebody else would buy it before we could get to the phone. For more than a year, we had been talking about where to retire. University professors, both of us, we liked to believe we took a logical approach to things. So instead of starting by thinking of places we might like to go, we had first defined our criteria, and only then made a list of possibilities—some of which actually met the criteria. Then we gradually narrowed it down. All that time, we had avoided the when question, and in fact still didn’t know the answer to that one. But now we at least knew where. It would be another five years before we actually walked out of our offices for the last time, to go build our house. During those five years we spent untold hours planning. We leafed through magazines and books of house plans, looking for the right one. At first these xii introduction Our land in New Mexico as it looked before we built on it. were plans for log homes, because Loren thought that was what he wanted. But then I persuaded him to move on to more conventional houses, and we pored over those. We browsed in home stores, considering cabinets, sinks, hardware, floor tile—all those things that go into building a house. Finally we ordered a set of plans to use as a starting point, and Loren painstakingly drew the layout into his computer so it could be altered. Over and over we changed it, compulsively . He even built a little model of the house so we could look in the windows, check out different slopes of roof, try to spot deficiencies . He built it out of thin white sheets of Styrofoam. It was so fragile we hid it in the attic when grandchildren were coming. I’m sure the house planning process is never easy. But the stakes seemed especially high as we planned this house, precisely because it was to be our home for retirement, for the duration. This was going to be our last house. So it seemed important to get it right. What “getting it right” meant, though, was far from obvious, since we weren’t sure what retirement would be like. But the habits and interests of a lifetime gave us clues. We knew that we...