Omigoodness! Just came in from a totally pointless, idle, and radically sentimental cruise of the Old Neighborhood.
It’s still there. It’s still called the Encanto neighborhood. It’s still beautiful. It’s still infested with the Young and the Upwardly Mobile, who seem to invest most of their money and their energy in fancifying and preserving the lovely old early 20th-century houses.
How I do miss it.
We left because I (ignorantly) imagined DXH (Dear Ex-Husband) would consent to put our son in the (excellent! top-of-the-line) Madison public schools if we moved north up Central Avenue into the Madison School District.
Wrong!
He refused to do so, and insisted on keeping the kid enrolled in the spectacularly expensive, annoyingly sosh’ private schools up there.
If I had known he would do that, I would never have lobbied to move up to North Central Phoenix. I hated the place and hated the snobs who infest it. Ultimately the stress from that move and my social exclusion from that fine exclusive company brought an end to the marriage.
Sorry. I’m just not lawyer’s wife material…. LOL! Born WT and always will be WT.
Ohhhh well.
Our old house is still there, looking much the same. Well maintained: whoever has it now must love it.
They did put a steel gate across the driveway: good move. Discourages the local bums and prospective burglars from entering the backyard via the west side of the house.
Wish we’d done that.
{sigh}
I did love the neighborhood. The reason we left was fear: the crime level was quite high. And we didn’t seem to be able to get away from it…
* The night Greta the Gershep caught a prowler in the living room, where he had just found me snoozing on the sofa (DXH had a deafening roar of a snore!). She chased the poor fella out the back door…I imagine he’s still running.
* The guy who tried to get in the side door as I was sitting in the adjacent room typing a seminar paper. I ran to the front door, threw it open, and screamed FIRE! FIRE!! FIRE!!! That brought out all the neighbors, excited to watch the house burn down, and scared the poor perp off down the alley.
* The sh!thead who tried to break in the front door as I stood there next to another German shepherd…whose presence didn’t even faintly faze the guy.
* The night my mother brought a pistol after I’d invited her to stay overnight. Yeah.
Well. No wonder, eh?
But still: it was such a pretty neighborhood, and the neighbors were such a delight, a constant delight.
We moved up to North Central: Snobsville North, as we might call it. I’m just too fragile a little blossom to survive hate, prejudice, meanness, and petty snobbery…the result being that the marriage didn’t survive them, either. How I came to hate that place!
And I guess the hate slopped over onto the marriage.
Encanto remains a beautiful neighborhood. And I found myself wishing we still lived there, were still married, were proceeding happily ever after.
Yeah. Right.