This Last House: A Retirement Memoir

Chapter Eight: Being There

Chapter Eight Being There O ur 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. There was always that semi-arid spectacle just outside the window, and I could walk out into it whenever I felt like it. If I sat on the porch to read, it was right there when I looked up from my page. It all amounted to this: I became quieter in mind. I planted sweet clover on the septic field and carried water to it every day in buckets. For the first time in my life I started keeping a journal. This chapter will incorporate, here and there, bits and pieces of that sporadic record I kept of our days. Settling In Through the rest of July, after we moved in, and most of August we had hot weather—a convection-oven kind of heat utterly unlike that of Texas. The monsoon season never really arrived that year. Some days, by late afternoon, we found ourselves wondering if it had been a good idea to build without air conditioning, relying solely on windows and ceiling fans. Yet after years of living closed-up against heat and humidity I was glad to have the windows open. And the nights could be counted on to cool off. We rarely even turned on the ceiling fan above our bed. 143 Many nights we did indeed hear coyotes. Before we retired, while we were waiting and planning for our house, we had listened to the computer encyclopedia’s rendition of coyotes—and also to wolves, though we knew we wouldn’t have any of those—but that hadn’t prepared us for the pleasure of the real thing. There are plenty of coyotes in Texas, of course. Jeanie’s husband says they only have to go outdoors any night of the week, there in Weatherford, to hear them. But for me that’s a New Mexico experience. Sometimes when I got up in the night to go to the bathroom I would hear them yammering. I would stand at the window and listen and feel the breeze, and if I had my glasses on I could look out at a blanket of stars. We had such great skies! With our thin, dry air and freedom from light pollution, because the main ridge of the Sandias was between us and Albuquerque, nights were a deep, clear black that showed up the swoosh of the Milky Way and even the faint Pleiades. Days, a magical clear blue that varied from pale to intense, nothing but blue, sometimes with an isolated white puff or two. When storms came up, the roiling thunderheads were splendid. Tony Hillerman, the Four Corners mystery writer, commented once that reviewers of his novels sometimes complained of how he was always interrupting the forward motion of the plot with descriptions of clouds. But why not? He lived in New Mexico, after all, and he kept his eyes open. I remember an evening when we had some people over and were just sitting down to dinner. I had taken my chair when I happened to glance at the view out the window and broke into the conversation. “Look!” I pointed out at the sky. The full moon was just swimming up out of the Estancia Basin with an astonishing peachy glow. Other times I glanced up from a page to see bolts of lightning playing over those same plains, eastward toward Moriarty. The sky somehow became more a part of our lives. Toward the end of August that first summer we arranged for Doug to fly out for his birthday. We wanted him to get a sense of the 144 this last house new house right away, so he could think about us in a context and start attaching a sense of home to it himself. The second evening he was there, I was doing something or other at the computer after dinner and became aware that he was standing at my shoulder. I recorded the moment in my journal that night: Suddenly he was just there. He had made his...