So on Wednesday it was up to Yarnell with SDXB, there to visit La Maya, who is combining the summer, a fall semester of online courses, and a spring sabbatical to engineer a six-month retreat from the craziness that is her life down here in the Valley. She’s using the time to finish the anthology that she’s compiling with a co-editor (and that I’m copyediting) and to complete the monograph she’s begun. I expect she’ll spin off at least a couple of articles, too.
It’s so lovely up there, cool and breezy and quiet. Very quiet. Very soothing.
About a third of the town is for sale, thanks to the Recession-That-Was-Not-a-Depression. Walking around, we came upon the CUTEST little mini-house. They want $140,000 for it. Somebody bought one of the old miner’s shacks, basically demolished it to a wall, and then rebuilt completely. The result is…hard to describe.
The place is basically one room, but not. It’s a large one-story space where a generously sized bedroom has been partitioned off. There’s a very handsome, well appointed kitchen and a huge living space. And a service porch with a washer-dryer hookup and, I think, room enough for a freezer. An upright freezer would certainly fit in there, and you probably could get a small chest freezer into the space.
At first, peering in the windows, I thought DOWNSIZE!!!! Here’s your chance to downsize with a vengeance.
On second glance, though, it didn’t look to me as though the place has enough space for even one decent clothes closet. That would make it useful, alas, only for weekend retreats. It doesn’t look like you could reasonably expect to live there, no matter how much junk you divested yourself of.
While I could fit all my clothes into one closet, here in the Valley one of my house’s bedroom closets is completely given over to office supplies and computer gear. And it’s full. I need that stuff to do business, so, alas, there’s no practical way I could actually live up there. At least, not in that place.
Another holds linens plus the space heaters in winter and the fans in summer. No place in that pretty little house to fit your sheets and towels, either, as far as I could see.
But oh, it’s totally cute. It has its own well, which frees one from a very large expense (the local water company knows it has the residents by the short hairs). The natural landscaping with big local trees and a pile of granite boulders in back is just gorgeous.
Not a single helicopter buzzed us all day long. One noisy fighter jet passed by to the west, a single outlier from Luke Air Force Base. Otherwise, the sky was the way a sky is supposed to be: quiet, except for the occasional wind blowing through the trees. And the occasional bird tweeting, cooing, or cawing.
What would it be like to live there?
Quiet, I imagine.
And limited: when there are only so many people in a town, there are only so many personalities to get to know. And only so many activities, other than arguing over the water company, ever go on. And there’s no place to shop. by that, we mean really no place to shop. The locals have to drive all the way in to Prescott, Wickenburg, or Phoenix to visit a Costco or a supermarket. One gas station (imagine what gas costs in that place!).
It’s a great place to visit, but…yeah.
The wish i could afford a vacation home thought wafted briefly through my mind, followed by the ARE YOU CRAZY? thought. Even if I could afford it, do I or do I not have enough work taking care of the place I’m living in, which is itself in a place that people pay to come and visit.
Speaking of taking care of the place, it’s past time to finish the laundry and clean up this shack. Bye!