Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.

This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with a kitchenette, then a rental house in the middle of town. I went to Lincoln Junior High School and had the requisite school jacket. After a while, we moved onto the air base for a while. When Helen decided the house was too small, my parents bought a brick rancher in a new subdivision on the edge of town. (I then attended Jefferson Jr. High and couldn’t wear my jacket.) That was where we stayed the longest — with me now at Cooper Jr./Sr. High School — until at last they sold it just before our move to Massapequa, New York (!). What with one delay after another, we then had to make another rented house our home for almost six months before finally leaving town. If you haven’t been keeping count, that adds up to five moves in less than four years!

Helen’s residence until a long month ago was the place I knew as the “family home” in Tucson. She’d lived there for over twenty years alone and outfitted it very nicely for a desert double-wide. It’s where I stayed this time and will likely stay again, when I come back to sign papers and dispose of everything. (IF I come back, I should say. More on that later.) The place has got to be one of the best-landscaped and situated properties in Tucson Estates, the so-called mobile home community for residents over 55 on the southwest edge of town. It’s adjacent to an arroyo where coyotes and javelinas go. There are mature trees and garden areas with a large paved patio. You can sit in a big screened porch and watch the doves and hummingbirds. Inside, it’s filled with Helen’s paintings and many beautiful keepsakes. The carpeting is plush and soft. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. There’s also a big carport and a separate art studio.

A recurring theme in Helen’s last few years, however, was how she hated the responsibility of maintaining the place and yearned for a smaller, simpler home. On the face of it, this sounded sane to me. It was easy to imagine being 86 years old and not wanting to worry about the plumbing. The trouble was, practical concerns like that weren’t on her mind. She either couldn’t stand to simply let things be or couldn’t face the crisis of making choices and wanted somebody else to “take care of things.” This would invariably be one of us five siblings, and earlier this year she’d again floated the absurdist fantasy that my wife and I should take over the old place and be neighbors with her in Tucson Estates. In typical fashion, however, the thrust of this offer was that I would never be able to obtain a nicer home for us, being an artistic ne’er-do-well, and that my wife deserved far better than my forcing her to live in Taos. (Always the carrot and the baseball bat, together.)

In any case, I never figured she would do it. How can an 86-year-old woman take that kind of disruption in her life? But if she did, I knew or hoped that I could count on her to buy something decent. She’d actually pulled this stunt once before, a few years back, and eventually been convinced by sister M____ and others to move back to the double-wide. What I mean is, I just assumed she’d learned her lesson. Extremely naive on my part, for sure. I also think one sometimes manufactures hope to cover up the pain.

But she did it, and she did it badly. Very badly indeed. For one thing, she paid way too much and wasted precious cash for something she didn’t need. (My gently pointing this out resulted in my being attacked for never supporting her decisions.) For another, well, let’s start with a look at the old residence:

Old house: large screened porch

This is where you want to be except when it’s god-awful hot. From here you can watch the birds and look at your gardens. There’s tons of room and comfortable chaise lounges that are easy to nap on. I love it out there. The evening sun sets on the other side of the house, too, so it’s cooler here. Now contrast this with the screened porch on the “new” trailer Helen moved into a few weeks ago:

New house: narrow, hot, and ugly

Yes, that’s an apartment-sized washer & dryer in the background — Helen wets the bed every now and then, and that machine is too small to wash her blankets. (There are big, matched Maytag machines back at the old place.) This porch is much narrower and looks out on the side of the single-wide next door. What’s more, it’s on the sunny side of the house! In Arizona, that can be a death sentence. No one will ever want to sit out here.

Old house: just part of the landscaping

The shot above shows a little of the outdoor space beside the screened porch at the previous residence. Why give up what had always been a source of comfort and joy? The plantings and nearby wildlife almost made staying at Helen’s bearable, in fact.

Old house: carport, arroyo to the right

Helen’s studio is at the back. The steps to the house are specially-built, wide and shallow, easy for old legs to manage. The trees are full of birds all day. But take a look at this shot of where she lives now:

New house: rear of carport

That’s it, that’s all there is. The view isn’t a fair comparison, but you get the idea. This carport isn’t wide enough for the Chevy Cobalt I rented, and the steps to the kitchen door [not shown] are narrow and steep.

The sink in the tiny kitchen of the new place isn’t big enough to hold a frying pan, and there isn’t any dishwasher like Helen had before. The “bottom shelf” in the lower cabinets is the floor itself, and the counters all have very sharp edges. Dark brown fake wood paneling is everywhere. The previous owner’s dishes are still in the cupboards, and she uses them. I could go on and on and on: the bathroom in her old place was custom-designed with a soaking tub for old folks, special handholds and all. There’s even a walk-in closet. In the new place, the bathroom is so small that if someone were on the toilet when you opened the door, you’d hit them on the knee. The bathtub is horrible and slippery — Helen can only sit in a chair and take a sponge bath. There’s hardly any storage space at all.

This, however, is perhaps most telling of all:

New house: view across the road

Okay, ready now? The following is what it looks like across the street from the OLD house!

A little light in hell

My photos don’t necessarily convey the real differences, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The thing is, it’s just not like her, not like the woman who decorated the old place. No gardens to enjoy, no views, no birds or animals to watch, no porch to sit on. No beauty whatsoever, and someone else’s pictures are still on the walls. The new trailer is narrow, leaky, damp, and dark. My God, I realized: just like a grave!

It makes a kind of sense, this living death, but it’s very hard to take and very stupid. Helen needs live-in care, at least, and in the old home there were extra bedrooms where someone could easily have lived with her. Not so here! What’s more, the old woman paid cash for this, at least $50,000, money she could have used to pay for care. That would make it a tragedy, except that this is Helen’s chronicle. As we shall see, the last move of her life is actually her chosen way to die, as if she had no one to care for her and there were no other choice.

So be it, then, and on with the show.

The old lady [see previous post] was admitted to the hospital yesterday, and yes, she has pneumonia. She’s also tried twice to “escape” and almost succeeded last night in ripping the IV out of her arm and making it to the hallway. Urk.

So it’s come to this.

The next step is “chemical restraint,” i.e. sedation, and I think I know what comes next: she either eats or doesn’t, and then they ask us if we want to keep her going. She’s going to “escape,” all right, one way or the other, but I don’t think she’ll be coming home again.

Full circle in Tucson, AZ coming up, maybe. My oh my.

A slightly different version of this and one other at FotoFeed. That’s from early yesterday afternoon, taken five minutes south of town looking roughly north.

Rio Grand Gorge w/ storm over Lobo Peak

Probably only Leos broadcast their birthdays in advance. No, not to get presents or put on airs — Leos don’t have to — but because they feel free to do so. It’s natural. The last thing my wife would do, or would have done even many years ago, is talk up her birthday, except privately to intimates. Not me! On the other hand…

Nagasaki

Today is Hiroshima Day, and I was born on August 9th, the day we dropped the second a-bomb on Nagasaki. The actual day, not the anniversary. That’s always felt significant to me, although there had to have been many thousands of other people born that day all over the world. (I wonder how we’re doing?)

I take my birthdays very seriously. They’re like portals, you know. Because of that, while I sometimes like to get raucous, I generally try to think of something personally important to do on those days, as opposed to merely seeking entertainment. Not that I have anything against a blow-out party, nosirree, it’s just that some of the best things happen in the all-alone. That may make me one weird Leo [see above], but that’s the way it goes.

This might be the year I climb a mountain, or go up as far as I can get. I might even spend the night out there. My wife actually suggested that, which shows how much she’d like a little peace and quiet. I have minimal Wal-Mart dilettante outdoor equipment, which is to say cheap shoes, ordinary clothes, a decent backpack, a couple of water bottles, and not much sense. I’m also not in shape, but then how many of my contemporaries are even standing? Besides, it’s part of the transcendental experience, what with sweating off 10 pounds and over-stressing every joint. And the long hot bath after I come home is to die for, irony intended.

How cold could it be this time of year at 11,000 feet, anyway?

I’m slowly catching up, still a day or two behind, but there are four more to see.

Meanwhile: here, for your viewing pleasure, is a baby horned toad. Yes, I finally “caught” one. This is a telephoto shot from about four feet away, cropped in Photoshop to bring it even closer. That’s one reason it’s a little blurry. The other reason is that I was in a hurry, obviously. And those are pine needles it’s clambering over, which should tell you something about the size (less than one inch long):

I’ve seen even smaller ones, too!

Things like this never happen when I have my camera with me.

Yesterday my wife and I took our exercise walk up the mesa. On the way back we saw two baby horned toads! These were two separate incidents, amazingly. And when I say “baby,” I mean tiny, about the size of my thumbnail. I took this relative abundance to be a good sign. After all, how many folks have ever seen a baby horned toad?

A couple of years ago I saw two babies riding on their mother’s back, one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever witnessed. She froze in the middle of the dusty trail, giving me a good long look as I stood right over them. This was extraordinary enough, to see the three of them, but then one of the little ones crawled off and walked a few inches away, onto a patch of sand that was much lighter in color than his (?) mother’s back. And then he changed color to match! I mean, in no more than a second or two. I didn’t even know they did that, but this one sure as hell did.

So today I walked up there by myself, and of course I took my camera. Hah. Nary a horned toad to be seen, naturally.

Run away, run away

But I did run across a piñacate beetle, otherwise known colloquially as a “stinkbug.” I’ve run into these before, and they deserve the nickname. It was the only animal I saw on this walk, but I had a good time anyway. I think I would rather just “be” out in the wilderness than do almost anything else in this world, even if all I see is a stinkbug. It has to do with the universal quality of consciousness arising from no thought.

I worry less and less these days. I know that’s odd, considering my history of apocalyptic rants. And by the way, did you know the Germans are preparing for a huge crowd in Berlin for Obama’s speech?

Okay, here you go, growing just outside the door, practically. I make a mean apricot pie, or better yet, turnovers. Apricots growing right out of the ground! Don’t say I never gave you nuthin.

No, these aren’t ripe yet, but we’re gonna have a ton of ‘em

Aerial image © 2008 by Eva-Marie Brekkestø

Oh, those hoaxers are busy, all right. It’s hard work, too. Just you try getting a bunch of people out to a grain field in the middle of the night and creating something like this in a few minutes, then getting away without leaving any tracks or tire marks. This image is from Westwoods, near Lockeridge, Wiltshire, reported July 17, 2008.

Man, are there a lot of bugs this year.

The funny thing is, for the longest time before and after we moved out here I had the idea that there weren’t any bugs in New Mexico. I have no idea why. My late mother-in-law, reeling with ecological guilt, used to say “they don’t salt the streets here” in her beloved Des Moines. Maybe it’s the same kind of thing.

One of the reasons I wanted to move out here from Maryland was because there weren’t any bugs, you see. In one respect, I was right: because of the cold, there are certainly more insect-free months here. There have to be fewer mosquitoes, too, because it’s usually so dry, though the ones I do meet up with are awfully ravenous. Something to do with an average of 14 people per square mile, probably.

But there are insects, all right. I figure about 600 species of flies, mostly, all sizes. The other night I was sitting outside with my dinner, and two flies dove right into my gravy — they didn’t buzz around and accidentally fall in, they dive-bombed straight into it! What makes New Mexico flies special is that all of them bite: the itty-bitty gnat things, the welterweights, what look like house flies, and on up to great buzzing things the size of Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, only hairier. At night in the summer, it’s moths, or used to be. A few years back when we lived higher up in the mountains in San Cristobal, there were so many, it was ridiculous. I was almost afraid to breathe for fear of suffocating from them. They’d pour in through the screen-less windows and thud against my computer monitor until it drove me insane. Big ones, too. But it doesn’t seem that there are that many in these parts just now. Could be it’s the weather.

In Maryland we used to get these tiny little beetles that would crawl through the screens and fly in our faces while we tried to read at night. We also had blacksnakes in the eves, but that’s for another post. Here in el Norte, I’ve hardly ever seen a snake — fewer than back East — but I did find a baby scorpion crawling across the kitchen counter once. None of those last few are actual bugs, of course, and neither are the black widow spiders that live behind the power supplies and cabling in the corner underneath my desk. They never venture out, apparently, and I’m not complaining.

Actually, with the possible exception of the big red-and-black ants that go after my sweetie every time she goes outside in her little flat sexy nothing sandals, most of the insects here are live-and-let-live. Ah yes, the Code of the West. I guess you can tell there aren’t many grasshoppers this year, because I haven’t mentioned them. They would definitely be an exception to the Code, although they never bit me personally. Now that I think of it, so would the box elder bugs, because they only recognize their own kind, aided by the fact that there are so many of them.

It’s not like we’re overrun with box elders, either, so the whole thing beats me.

I did something different today, bought a brushcutter/line trimmer at Sears. On the way to the dentist, no less, and both bills were the same!

It’s huge and weighs a ton. There isn’t even a place to put it, but I have one now. I just wanted to be able to cut the weeds and tall grass around the house, and also down by the acequia. It’s a matter of being able to walk around freely, to tell the truth, as the vegetation around this old adobe has been out of control for years. Charmingly so, but now we can’t find things.

I’ve been looking at several varieties of these devices for a while, and today I just did it. Mr. Visa can pay for it. We could be dead tomorrow, and I’d never get a chance to put my eye out, so this had to be. Did I mention it was huge? It has a brushcutter attachment that looks medieval. I’m sure I can slice coyotes in half with it and wreak vengeance on the chamisa. The strap has a big red plastic sign that hangs over my back and reads, “DANGER! Maintain 50 ft. distance!”

Kind of an amazing tool for an aspiring fool. Yeah, there’s this whole hillside of sagebrush and a thicket of wild roses to contend with, but we’re renting. It’s not my place. Well, today I stopped caring about that and just wanted to make it better. It’s been nine years since I owned a gasoline-powered tool that wasn’t a chainsaw, and here I am again, Farmer John without a field, acquiring implements of mass vegetative destruction. It’s out there in the dark somewhere now, covered by a tarp.

Waiting to work on a ranch, I think. This little place is just a practice cut.