Future New Mexicans

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My Dad and Xavier standing on the site of our future home.

Our time here in Maryland grows short. Big transactions are taking place and in a few months our new house (from Clayton Homes) will be delivered to this land near the Manzano Mountains in New Mexico.

It is what keeps me going day after day.

I grew up on this land and it’s time to go home and be near my family.

I can’t wait to visit all the local wineries and be able to buy wine at Costco and Trader Joe’s (can’t do that in Maryland). Did you know there is a winery in Albuquerque that has both red and green chili wine?

Most importantly, Xavier and I want an actual home that is not an apartment. We want to have our own space, our own yard, a workshop; our very own hippie homestead with wind turbines, solar panels, and rain collection barrels. (And Wi-Fi… don’t forget the Wi-Fi)

But we want a certain type of lifestyle too.  We want to fly light.

That means living with low overhead. Buying a home that is easily affordable instead of barely affordable. We’re minimalist in that regard. We want to spend our money on adventures and experiences instead of on unnecessarily inflated bills.

At first we had planned to buy a tiny house but that proved to be impractical for a whole host of technical reasons, like zoning laws say for instance. As it turned out, it made a whole lot more sense to buy a manufactured home. It’s still small but not so tiny that it has a weed sprayer shower or an electric hotplate for a stove plus I won’t have to be hoisting my dog up a ladder every night when we go to bed.

I really didn’t want to hoist my dog up a ladder.

Anyway, New Mexico awaits, the wheels in the sky are turning and all we have to do is stay the course.

September

October

November

So long Maryland and hello New Mexico!

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I Don’t Write Fiction In 2017

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I intended to write an eloquent soliloquy in farewell to 2016 but my neighbors are playing their music so fucking loud that my dishes are rattling so let’s talk about that instead.

There are many compelling reasons to move away from the apartment life and chief among them is neighbors. Neighbors and their music, kids, friends with benefits leaving their cars all over the place, dogs that they don’t clean up after, and their sticky discarded mattresses in the dumpster.

People can be disgustingly annoying and adult human beings should not share common walls with one another.

By this time next year I’ll be writing from the breakfast nook of my new home in Los Lunas, New Mexico.

But a whole lot of stuff has to happen before that outcome can materialize.

There is money to make, contracts to sign, school to attend, credit to repair, land to be cleaned up and a house to buy.  The massive river of inertia is once again being rerouted only this time it leads back to the southwest.

The east coast is alright, it’s green, the squirrels are cute and the ocean is nifty but I don’t belong here. It’s not in my blood.

In 2017 Xavier and I are both going back to school. The time has come to sharpen the ax. In the meantime I am working in the print and marketing department at the nation’s largest supplier of stapler accessories.  It’s ok for now.  It’s consistent income which is more than I can say for the fitness industry.  I’m going after a degree in computer science though so the copy machines are temporary.  It’s not a bad job but I want more money, a lot more money.

I feel like I have underutilized my intellectual capacity.  I want to do something that makes me feel smart and pays the bills.  I’ve discovered plenty of ways not to accomplish this and I no longer have the wherewithal for messing around with mindfuck MLMs.  If you’ve been flirting with the disaster known as “home based business”, let me save you some valuable time and money with this one piece of advice.

If you want to make real money, learn real skills.

Peddling bogus nutritional products or whatever imaginary system that Empower Network sells is not a real skill and the longer you leave your hand in the fire the more in debt you’re likely to become. Are they scams? No, but they’re bullshit games of hot potato; passing the buck on a product that is inherently worthless until or unless you can pass it off to someone else by convincing them that you know the “secret” when all along it was only hypnotic smoke and unicorn tears.

So, like I said, it’s time to hit the books, to grow the brain, to work smarter not harder and to invest in our future.

Let’s call 2017 The Year Of The Wolf.  The year of strong connection with instincts and intuition, high intelligence, loyalty and communication.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go break my neighbor’s stereo.

Coming Full Circle

 

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Home, a place with a lot of tumbleweeds and trailer houses.

In 1984, my parents bought a mobile home and put it on a piece of land out on the mesa in front of the Manzano Mountains.   At the time, the nearest neighbor was a mile away and my parents thought it was glorious.  Unfortunately the nearest phone was also a mile away. I saw nothing glorious about that.

We lived far from everything. Far from the mall, far from my school, far from my friends, and especially far from Albuquerque – which is where all the cool kids were.

Valencia county was generally unconcerned with maintaining the dirt roads so during monsoon season we would go without mail service for weeks at a time, we also had to make our own path through the desert to come and go because our road would be underwater.

Still, my parents were enchanted with this place. “It’s so quiet”, they would brag to their friends. “There’s no light pollution and we can see all the stars“, they would say while setting up their telescope.

Fuck that, I want cable TV.

They had purchased five acres of land and split it into two 2.5 acre lots.  My deadbeat aunt and uncle moved into their own mobile home next door.  They made zero payments on the trailer or to my parents for their land lease.  In the meantime, they did manage to erect an impressive chain-link fence, raise some malamutes, and sell some drugs.

They got the boot.

Later on, my other deadbeat aunt moved her own mobile home onto that side of the land. She was a depressed hoarder with trash piled up to the windows and she too failed to make any payments.  When my step-dad found the cages of dead birds in her living room, she was next to get the boot.

As I was going through my teenage years, this “glorious” place in the middle of nowhere turned into something else entirely.  Imagine being stranded on a desert island with two people in a relationship that is going south.

As my parents grew to like each other less, the silence became a void filled mostly with the sounds of slamming doors and never-ending passive aggressive standoffs. Sufficed to say, the glory was starting to wear off.

When I was 19, the universe told me it was time to move to Las Vegas, NV.  Six weeks prior to my departure, the parental situation came to head and my step-dad told my mom to get the fuck out, which she did.

But not me, I still lived there, playing marriage counselor to both of them right up until the last day.

But when I left, I left.

That was in 1995.  I had no plans of going home again.

Fast forward 21 years.

My step dad still lives on the land only now he’s married to my ex-sister-in-law. Wait, what?  He married my ex-husband’s oldest sister.  I know… you can’t make this shit up.

After a couple years of living in Easterville, Xavier and I have decided to move back to New Mexico so I took him there for a visit earlier this year.  We were planning on moving to Albuquerque, of course, because that’s where the cool kids are but I still took him down to Los Lunas to show him around.  I took him out to visit my stepdad on the land where I grew up and I had assumed that he would be horrified by the place.

He wasn’t.

We have a dream of flying light, of living with low overhead and never being stressed about money, of having more freedom and less worry.

We’ve done countless hours of research on the virtues of manufactured homes.

We’ve stood hand in hand on the beach at midnight and gazed deep into the milkyway while baby ghost crabs ran over our feet and the dark ocean tide was heard but not seen.

We live in an apartment in the city now and one thing’s for sure. The rent never goes down. Constant road noise, constant alarms going off and sirens running up and down the street all hours of the day and night.  Most of all, constant neighbors in every direction. Light pollution mucks up the night sky and we might see a star or two but only the biggest and brightest make it through the haze.

We talk about that night by the ocean and looking out into forever.

 The desert is an ocean with it’s life underground.

And maybe it was time to reconsider this idea of going home.

Nothing but a broke down fence and a pile of trash live on the other side of the land now. More neighbors have moved in but they are still a civilized distance away and at night, the sky opens up in a concert of stars like no one living on the east coast has ever seen.

I never wanted to go back because I thought the life I had lived there could only repeat itself.

But now, I long for the quiet and for the stars. I can see a future there that is different from my past.

At age 41, I didn’t expect to discover that everything I wanted was in the place where I began, the place that I couldn’t get away from fast enough, but time is the great revelator after all and every prophet is in her house.

As it turns out, I want to go home again.

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