At the Foot of the Black Hill

Javelinas

"This is a good neighborhood," she said.  But she was the seller's realtor:  I discounted.  The seller agreed, adding details:  I added back.

"Maybe," I thought.  I hope so.  But part of good-neighborhooding has to do with what we bring to the neighborhood.  I made a mental list of places where we had lived.  All of them, with the possible exception of two temporary stops, where everyone, including us, knew that we were temporary, were places with good neighbors, but we had little time to discover them.

What is this about?  We are going to move, again!  We are going back to Tucson, Arizona where, twice before (and three times for me) Mari and I have lived.  We are returning.  This Spring, Mari will retire from her job.  We will become desert rats, again.

"How is it possible," I wondered aloud, "for descendants of Norwegian fisher- and farmer-immigrants, to come to love the desert?"

"That's easy!" my brother said.  "I like to be warm!"

Yes!  And javelinas.  And Gambel's quail.  Bobcats.  Plants that survive because accidental mutations made them waxier and water-retentive.  Little critters that hide from the sun and who come out at night.  Burrowers.  Night-blooming cacti.  Other cacti that spread spiderweb roots just below the desert surface, waiting for any drop of moisture, while at the same time, jamming one huge root down through the caliche, for balance.  Mesquite trees that are the descendants of ancestors with roots that burrow down, almost forever, following wherever water goes.  Mule deer on their hind legs reaching up for tender leaves.  Desert doves. Possibly the worst collection of politicians west of Michele Bachmann, here where we are now.

Tucson.  "Too-sahn."  Maybe once, "Tuk-son":  a Spanish variant of the original Tohono O'odham name for, "At the foot of the black hill".

We are going to move back to the foot of the black hill, or about an hour north of there, by horseback, to a house halfway up another hill.

Very soon, our house halfway up this hill, looking down at the Minnesota River, behind those trees down there, will go on sale, and we will have to think, not about the desert, but about Wall Street derivatives, and wonder what happened to our down-payment.  So far as we can tell, it has trickled down to the bank, not of the river, but of Wall Street, which bundled it with similar trivial funds, and sold the whole package to people in Iceland and cities within the Arctic Circle in Norway.

We shall be moving to a house half the size of the one we are in now, and are doing our best to embrace the exquisite art of getting rid of things.  There is no doubt that our reduced income will show the way.

But what a wonderful way!  We are going to make a great change!  Something new, but not unknown.  We are of a generation that has grown up in a world larger than the place where we were born, in which we have called several places home, and learned to love them.  Moving is not about rejection:  it is about the next step; the next good place.  I love where I first saw the world.  Like Mitt Romney, the height of those trees is imprinted there, is comfortable there, in my mind.  I see the mountain, still.  But there are places I love more, still; none more than Tucson, a city in the desert.

Once, I would have said that I loved San Francisco most of all, and I still do, but our banker bought a house there, and drove the price higher than Nob Hill.  And truth be told, I am old, and I like to be warm.  And I want javelinas to stop by, on their own trek.