Closer to the edge

Howdy from Albuquerque. As I sidled along tidy sidewalks next to cinder block walls and wooden fences in the neighborhood today, cold in the shade and warm in the sun, I pondered two things: the depthless blue of the late fall New Mexico sky and the progressive nature of mental illness.

Wait, Carol, what? Are you mentally ill? Well, what would you call a person who deliberately, almost rebelliously, even compulsively, eschews a traditional safe lifestyle for a path uncomfortably close to self-annihilation? I’ve been trying on the term minimalist. As in, Honey I shrunk myself and now I’m a minimalist! I’ve jettisoned possessions like an aged cat spews gas. If you don’t know me, it sounds plausible. Yeah, cool, Carol’s a minimalist. However, I know me, and I can’t hide behind a claim of minimalism. That would be a bit like spraying poo-pourri in the bathroom. We all know what goes on in there when you turn the faucet on full blast.

It could be that my mental compulsion to downsize is in alignment with the current zeitgeist of decluttering and simplifying. Some of you might say, Thank you, Carol, for living simply so that others might simply live. Right. You obviously don’t know me.

Doing a Marie Kondo on my life might actually be trendy but my hipness factor is unearned—in fact, if I'm hip for pursuing a minimalist lifestyle, it is purely coincidental. I was dismantling my life, or it was crumbling around me, long before it was cool to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Who cares. I’m beyond hip now. I’m out in the stratosphere, way past Swedish death cleaning, on my way to total erasure.

What is “pure” minimalism? Is that a thing? No idea.

As part of my quest to downsize after Mom died, I decided to move from Portland to Tucson. You all know the story. My decision was logical (I thought), based on my knowledge at the time. Now I know there were some things I didn’t know, and I didn’t realize then that I should have known them. For example, I didn’t know I was a credit ghost. That situation made it difficult to rent an apartment. (Embarrassing disclosure: I apparently failed to recall that I may have created that condition years ago myself by freezing my credit after some generic data breach. No recollection.) Second, I didn’t know how expensive car insurance was in Arizona (I could have researched it). Further, I didn’t know that fiber optic for internet is not a thing in my Tucson neighborhood and never will be (could have researched that, too). Finally, I’d heard rumors but didn’t fully understand that tenants in Arizona have almost no rights (it’s right there in the Arizona Landlord and Tenant Act, I could have looked it up and chosen to move to a different state—apparently Oregon has good tenants’ rights. Who knew).

I wasn’t totally ignorant. Some things I knew. Stuff we all know. You get what you pay for. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. There’s a sucker born every minute. Nothing is guaranteed but death and taxes. Blink and you’ll miss it. The early bird gets the worm and then is annihilated by a diamond back rattlesnake. Never fall in love with a car.

I am not all-knowing. I doubt if anyone is, even though some people I’ve known sure act like it. Carol, you should [insert suggestion here]. I’m sure part of the reason I’m standing on the edge of the existential cliff overlooking a fresh new hell is because I deliberately did the opposite of what they all suggested. I'm obstinate that way. Hence, the diagnosis of mental illness. Well, the difference between a suggestion and a criticism is not hard to discern.

At some point, you have to stop peeling back the layers. If you peel too deep, what’s left? There’s just a gaping mouth, waiting for a kind soul to insert worms. Nobody is going to stuff food down my throat except me—at least, not until I’ve had a couple strokes and can no longer lift a fork to my lips. Whenever I feel like whining Oh, no, please don’t make me take care of myself, my mother’s voice rings in my ears. This not the voice of my demented mother, the one I trailed behind, stooping as needed to rescue a dropped glove, a used tissue. Rather, it is the voice of the mother who lived with my father and sneakily thwarted his wishes at every turn. He wanted me living in their basement forever, tied to his twenty-dollar bill gas-money handouts. She wanted me out of the house to sink or swim on my own. To motivate me, she spoke the dreaded words: “Carol, just get a job.”

As I contemplate the pursuit of a life shallow in material possessions but flowing with creativity, I hear her voice daily. Right on, Mom. I hear you. I could get a job, I bet. Probably. As long as it doesn’t involve leaning my head back or balancing on a ladder, there are many things I could do. Probably not driving, maybe not heavy lifting, but I could certainly sell small things to customers. How long before stoking the fires of consumer culture sent me running screaming into the night?

I’m squatting (stiffly, because of arthritis) at the intersection of a few questions. First, what is home? What is it, where is it, and how small can home be before it cannot support life? There must be someplace for me somewhere, probably more than one someplace. It’s a big country and it’s not like I’m moving to Mars. Here’s another question: What is freedom? Is anyone truly free? Where on the planet can you go to avoid someone holding up a book of statutes and telling you No, you can’t live like that?

What if I don’t want to be a tenant or a traditional homeowner? What other options are open to me? Even if I bought an undeveloped patch of land in the desert, there are laws about parking a “home” there. There are laws about parking a “home” on someone else’s land. There are laws about parking a “home” on BLM land, which supposedly belongs to all of us.

You’ve probably heard people say something like “home is where the heart is” and thought, Aww, isn’t that sweet. I don’t find it all that helpful. My heart has been obliterated, shattered into a billion glittery bits that haven’t yet fallen to earth. Maybe they will eventually coalesce and stake a claim in some city I can find on a map. Silver City, my friend says. Bisbee, you would love it there, lots of artists. Sedona, Wickenberg, Green Valley, Ajo, Yuma, Quartzite.

One more truism: If you don’t have a “home,” then you can never be lost.

This ten-day cat-sitting house-sitting gig in Albuquerque has given me some valuable insights. Albuquerque is an appealing city, with its pueblo architecture and civilized sidewalks. Despite the dry air and nosebleeds, I have enjoyed seeing some local sights. For example, the petroglyphs are a twenty-minute walk away, how cool is that. However, if you’ve seen one ancient rock carving, you’ve pretty much seen them all, and the weather, despite the sunshine and blue sky, is colder than a snowball’s dirty brown underbelly, and being cold sucks. It’s not winter yet and the nighttime temps are below freezing. It's not news that I was not made for cold weather. I’ve been complaining about being cold forever. My blood slows to a viscous crawl below 50°F.

Regarding the house-sitting gig, this four-bedroom two-story condo would be great for someone young enough to be on the ascending side of a career trajectory. Owning a house like this says you have achieved the American dream, you have arrived, congratulations, you are finally a viable adult. (We were worried about you for a while.) For someone like me, a nontraditional oldster tumbling in freefall down the descending side of a career trajectory, living in a place like this would be a heavy drag on my quest for minimalism. It’s a lot of space that demands constant upkeep and cleaning for no good purpose except to store and display the trophies of success. I don’t need display shelves anymore. I never achieved success, and I gave what few trophies I earned to the thrift stores.

The best part of any home is the four-legged creatures who dwell within. However, much as I am enjoying caring for this funny little old cat, my heart has not found solace. It is great to feel cat fur again, but petting a cat who is not Eddie does not fill the massive Eddie-sized hole in my heart. 

And, oh yeah, the check engine light came on again. So, if I don’t see you here on this blog next Sunday, I’m stuck somewhere on I-25 or I-10 in the desert between Albuquerque and Tucson. I'd be obliged if you would send a posse.

Still homesick for something

It's been six months since my mother died. After her death, I was busy helping my family wrap up the estate. Then I was immersed in the process of buying a car, packing and shipping my stuff, and driving to Tucson. Then I got busy finding a place to live. For the past two months in Tucson, I've been rolling with the weather, from warm to hot to blazing, and then to wind, rain, and thunder. I guess I could pat myself on the back for being in the moment, but at some point, don't we have to stop and reflect?

I spent the last five years of my life drawing inward toward my mother in a tightening orbit. Now she's gone. It's as if someone moved the sun. Like, there I was trotting around her, fetching, carrying, singing, showing up for whatever her moment looked like, and suddenly, there's nothing in the center anymore. It's just blank space.

You might be thinking, well, Carol, you didn't have to lose yourself so completely in her life that you lost your own. Nobody asked you to do that. It certainly wasn't on the daughter-duty list. Do I sound like I'm complaining? I think I'm reflecting. I woke up this morning and realized I'm orbiting a black hole. It's an unsettling realization but sooner or later, necessary.

I store an image in my mind of my dead mother lying in the ER bed, eyes shut, mouth just a little open. In that image, to me, it's not really my mother lying there dead, it's an unpainted papier-mâché sculpture of my mother. That's because this fake pale mother has no teeth. Her dentures are in a plastic bag on the counter. That means her face is sunken and misshapen, like the balloon inside popped and the newspaper strips are sagging with gravity. It isn't my mother's face at all. Not the mom I used to visit and talk with and sing with. Some cartoon body with a blanket pulled up to its chin. Nothing to fret about, nothing to miss. 

I talk to her every now and then while I'm stuck in stasis (indoors in the heat and monsoon) waiting for my new home to appear. Ma, I say. Sometimes that's all I say. Ma. Ma. Ma. I sound like one of those kids that frazzled mothers drag around grocery store aisles. You see them yanking on their mothers' jackets and demanding candy. Ma! Chocolate! Ma! Pay attention to me. 

I miss what she used to be, not what she became. I would not want her back. She would not want to be back. Likewise, I don't miss Portland but I'm not home yet in Arizona. I don't know where I belong, or if I ever belonged anywhere. When I think of "home," no place comes to mind, no place I can say, yeah, that place, now that place was home. Home for me has always been about people. I always came or went because of people. Now I'm alone and I have to put myself in the center of my orbit if I want to create my next home. Conceptually I know how to do that but I'm not feeling it yet in my body or soul.

You can't take the city out of the girl

A bit of wind blew in a bank of gray clouds and a little rain, which dissipated into lots of puffy white clouds. I guess blue sky is back. It's warm enough in the trailer for the AC to kick on so I assume it is warm outside. I live in two climates, cave and desert. 

Speaking of desert, this week after receiving my second Covid-19 vaccine, I almost found a place to live. On Craigslist, I found a unique posting for a "quaint and rustic" stone casita. The one photos showed a charming wooden door and a stone paved patio. Perfect! It was situated west of the 10 freeway in a patch of old ranch land. I Google Earthed it and plotted my path out to what passes for ranch land in Tucson.

When I hear the word ranch, I think of my grandfather's cattle ranch in Eastern Oregon. We visited the ranch for a few days most summers when I was a kid. No more than a weekend though—my father hated that ranch. I had mixed feelings about the visits. The dry brittle air made my nose bleed. (To be fair, back then, everything made my nose bleed.) The harsh silence was disconcerting to a city kid. I could see planes high overhead, heading for PDX, but hear nothing but the wind scratching through the trees in the yard. 

For me, the best part of visiting the ranch was being around horses. My grandfather kept a few in the barn to help him with the cattle, but we were only allowed to ride old Betsy. One at a time, my father lifted us up to sit in front of my grandfather. Grandpa twitched the rein, and Betsy shambled along the dirt road to the gate. She was slow going away from the barn but fast coming home. I was paralyzed with the chore of parsing two conflicting emotions:  the utter joy of being on horseback and the fear of my grandfather, who was a large, gruff, mostly deaf, intimidating man.  

The Tucson desert is not like Eastern Oregon. Eastern Oregon gets snow. It's dry, but not this dry. Here, ranch land is littered with rocks, dry brush, and cacti. You could not graze cattle in the Tucson desert. You could not graze anything. You could probably grow a fine herd of rattlesnakes, though, if you had a hankering. Which I don't. Which brings me back to my story about the stone cottage. 

At some point in the early part of the twentieth century, some rancher built a stone mansion and some stone casitas out in the desert near a dry wash. The current owner of the ranch rents the casitas to over-55 year old adventurers who think living down a dirt road in a desert would be fun. I was almost one of those renters. 

I drove way out into the suburbs, noting the well-paved road and the many houses scattered around the hillsides among the cacti. As I parked my car, I marveled at the view of the mountains. The manager of the "apartments," an eighty-year-old artist, said she often saw coyotes and deer, and even a couple stags drinking at her outdoor water station. I thought, I like stags. I could set out water buckets and quench the thirst of wildlife. She took me into the available casita, which for some reason had four doors. 

First impression: it's a cave with a red concrete floor. Whoa, cool. A voice in my head said, wait, is that cool? The stone walls were painted a solid glossy white. The wood ceiling was low overhead. I thought, oh, how cozy, and then I thought, wait, where will all the hot air accumulate? I noted the beat up air conditioner leaning into (out of?) an open window. The hearth of a once-handsome stone fireplace had been covered with a piece of plywood, painted gray to blend with the stone surround. I pointed.

"No fires allowed here," she said. "Too much fire danger." I thought, well, of course, out here you would have to think about that. My next thought: would I worry about fire danger if I rented an apartment in the city? Possibly not as much, except for the odd neighbor with candles and cigarettes. 

To the left was a semblance of a kitchen. A double farmhouse sink, an old gas stove, some ramshackle cupboards, and a narrow refrigerator. 

"You'll have to buy the refrigerator from the previous tenant," the manager said. "Unless you want to buy your own."

"How much?"

"Two hundred." Oh, I thought, that's reasonable, while the other half of my brain said hmmm, is that reasonable? It's not very big. Do I need a bigger refrigerator? 

The bedroom was beyond the living room. A wood door with glass panes opened out onto a little patio. Cute, I thought. That might be the place to sit sipping my iced coffee while writing my novel. Except when it is cold. Or hot. Which here it is either/or, not much in between. So is that patio really cute and charming? Or is it just another doorway for scorpions?

Up three tall concrete steps was the bathroom—in essence, a bathroom on a pedestal. 

"Wow, three steps up," I said. "So you know when you get there, you are about to do something really special."

"The electricity isn't on so the light doesn't work," she said. I wondered what else didn't work. I hopped up the steps and peered inside. No tub. A large shower. I took a photo using my flash. Later I discovered the walls of the shower were yellow and the floor was the same red as the living room floor. I thought, could I live without a tub? The desperate part of my brain said, tub schmub, it's only $500 a month!

I was in a dream, imagining my life as a solitary writer, cocooned in a cozy cave in the desert. Could I live out here miles from anything resembling a grocery store? At that moment, I thought I could.

Back at the trailer later that evening, hours after she offered to rent the casita to me and after I said yes, as I was starting to feel a bit peaked from the shot, I started researching the task of keeping desert pack rats from nesting in my engine compartment and chewing up the wiring under my hood. Home remedies with dubious efficacy include Irish Spring soap, Pine Sol spritzers, and dryer sheets. Ugh, even I can't stand dryer sheets. Part of my brain was like, well, this is what people must do if they want to live the romantic life of a writer in a casita in the desert. The other part of my brain was like, dang it, I just spent another $1,800 fixing the dang check engine light and the transmission leak. Do I really want to pay to remedy pack rat damage? 

Next I pulled up information about rattlesnakes, scorpions, and spiders. You can imagine how it went from there. After getting input from my Tucson friends, my spiritual advisors, and my sister, I gave up on the idea of renting the casita in the desert. 

The benefit of this decision was immediately apparent. I got a return call from a woman renting a tiny house somewhere north of here. After looking on a map, I know that north of here is nothing but desert. Mountainous desert. 

"Oh, you live down in the city?" she said, aghast. "I only go down there when I have to. I can't wait to get back up on the mountain."

Today both sides of my brain are in agreement. We aren't going to rent a tiny house, a cute stone cottage, or any other dwelling that is on a mountain or down a dirt road in a desert. Romance is one thing, but reality is real. You can't take the city out of this girl. I know you are saying, Carol, there are critters in the city, too. However, most of the critters I encounter in town will probably be human. Given the choice between snakes and humans, I'll take my chances with human critters any day.