"A philosophy which exalts health and safety to the status of virtues
cannot be called heroic."
J. Brinckerhoff Jackson/A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time
On July 18 we will have lived in Texas for 10 years. Hopefully it won't come to that. The clock is running. The hourglass is trickling. The details are being worked out. Forget The Alamo! The end is near and New Mexico is close at hand.
It's over. Just like that. Finally.
A couple of weeks ago my wife sent me to New Mexico to look at houses. Alone. She put together a list of 11 places she found online - she is a meticulous and obsessive internet searcher - and sent me to have a look. And pick out a place for us to spend the rest of our lives. I picked. She likes the pick. We made an offer. It was accepted. It is a house that will embrace all of the life we bring to it and see us through. I think we recognized it as soon at we saw it on the internet. Dauna has seen photographs, but when we move there in a few weeks and she looks up the mountain and glimpses it through the trees it will be the first time she actually sees the house. ("Really," more than one person has asked? "Yes," always the answer.) I would trust her to do the same for me. And the house is right for people like us, a co-conspirator of a house. It's what we need. It's home.
Now there is the house here and there is the house there. I am juggling them as fast as I can. I spend my days wrapped up in the details of buying and selling and wandering among piles of real estate paperwork. For a man who never thought seriously about owning a house until I was 50 years old, I now have a house I want to call home and a home I want to get rid of. I am in a real estate frame of mind. Contracts are pending. It is slow and tedious work but it must be done. And it is time.
We have lived in Texas among Texans far too long - ten years in a place we always knew we never could call home. The Un-Texan was born in the first years we were here; more recently my wife has dubbed herself the Anti-Texan.
And we live in an Austin neighborhood among old people. They wrap themselves tightly in the fabric of their old lives but it does not seem to comfort them. They lament change. They worry about their health, their safety, streetlights and strangers, property values and Mexican-Americans, Jehovah's Witnesses who might be thieves casing the place (a black man and a white man together! Who knows what they might be up to?), traffic and speedbumps, firetrucks, police cars, ambulances. They worry and worry. Reports and alarms go out on the neighborhood association email daily. What we are about to do would alarm them too if they knew about it. They would advise caution. Their intentions would be good. But we have had enough of caution and good intentions, too.
So my wife and I are about to leave Texas and step into the mysterious and unsteady space between here and there one more time. It won't be the first time - in 24 years of marriage we have moved from apartment to house, renters to buyers, Minnesota urban to Wisconsin rural, Wisconsin to northern New Mexico, and from there to Texas - but we have promised ourselves this move will be the last. When we get back home to New Mexico this time we will stay. Besides, Austin's elevation is approximately 540 feet. The new house is at around 8,000 feet. We are rising in the world. We can feel how thin the air will be.
Dauna in New Mexico, 2011
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