Gosh, I miss our wonderful old ranch, up on the Mogollon Rim outside of Yarnell. What a beautiful place!! And what fun, what charm, living out in the middle of nowhere, on the bank of a lovely river, ten minutes out of a rustic cowboy town.
Today, walking around our once-suburban, now wholly citified neighborhood, I think of how much I wish I was still up on that ranch.
Ruby and I circumnavigate the park…all very nice, all very boring. We walk up to the tract’s northernmost border, the road I used to drive into town when I lived with my parents in Sun City and commuted to a downtown law firm five days a week. Back in the Day, this whole area was agricultural. The ‘Hood occupies tracts that once were filled with citrus trees and cotton fields. Now those fields grow houses. Most of them ugly, cheaply built houses.
We walk past our elderly friend’s house: she who has disappeared. Clearly. she’s not there. Whether she got locked up in an old-folkerie or whether she lucked out and passed away before that could happen, I dunno. But…her house doesn’t appear to be vacant.
She told me she was willing the house to her son, who lives elsewhere. She wanted him to be able to do as he wished with it: sell it and collect a chunk of cash, or keep it as a local outpost for when he comes into town.
The house hasn’t been shoveled out. It’s still being maintained by her regular yard crew. But nobody appears to be there. If she’d passed on, surely her son would have unloaded the place. So…well…I imagine she’s still clinging to life. Such as it is.
{sigh}