We’ve owned our house in Tucson for the past fifteen years. That may be a misstatement. It’s more likely the house has owned us.
It was a project when we bought it—a mid-century-not-so-modern—that had been remodeled badly, several times, most recently by someone who had zero understanding of the term “load-bearing walls” and who had cut through them with wild abandon. The electrical service was a mess with 220 live wires twisted together without so much as a wire nut in sight. The house, was in fact, one Bill Schilb away from the wrecking ball. We tackled the infrastructure first—replacing the non-working AC system, cleaning the never-before-cleaned ductwork (Broke the duct cleaning guy’s vacuum machine. He had to drag the first one away and come back with another!), and getting rid of the rooms’ worth of incredibly filthy and decades old shag carpeting.
Once that initial bout of frenzied rehab ended, we lived with the house as is for the better part of two years before gearing up to do a six-month live-in remodel. I can tell you with the voice of experience, that live-in remodels are hell. During that time, we stripped the place down to the studs, re-engineered walls to make them load-bearing again, replaced the electrical service, fixed knotty plumbing issues, and brought a 1940s-vintage kitchen into the 21st century. Whew!
By the time we got to the kitchen part of the rehab, we were running out of remodeling time and money, so we made a few compromises. Natural gas was roughed in for the stove-top, but no gas cooktop was available right when it was needed. Instead, we ended up installing an electric infrared glass cooktop and pretty much hated it from day one. As for the granite slab countertops we’d planned on? We were totally out of time by then, so we ended up laying granite tile on the countertops instead.
During all this flurry of activity, the outside of the house needed lots of work, too, but it remained much as it was when we started. Gradually we began upgrading the small enclosed yard at the back of the house. We laid tile over the patio’s damaged concrete that was hell to walk on in bare feet. We replaced the pool heater, fixed the pool deck and hot tub, and extracted a jungle’s worth of lantana from the pool yard. When we first moved in, one the side of the lot opened on a major east/west thoroughfare while the other opened on a utility easement. Lots of dazed and confused people came wandering through that back backyard and those visitors brought with them more than their fair share of left-behind beer cans and bottles along with all kinds of general trash. One day while driving through town, we spotted a pickup truck with a sign that said, the Irish Setter. We actually followed him to a stop light to get his phone number. He was a bricklayer who hailed from Ireland. We hired him almost on the spot. He and his crew built a five-foot tall block wall around the entire perimeter of the lot.
Next up, we discovered that our lot came with water rights which we either had to use or lose. We hired a guy to dig the well, but it turned out he wasn’t particularly good at it. That meant we had to hire someone else to drill a second well, one that actually works. We added landscaping here and there, including a wonderful Texas ruby grapefruit which we’ve been enjoying for breakfast every day since we’ve been here. We had a huge adventure moving a palm tree that was close to the house and cutting down a seventy-five foot tall rotted palo verde that could easily have taken out our newly remodeled kitchen
When a stranger came wandering through our house in the middle of the night a few years later, we immediately installed security shutters over all the patio sliders. Last year we replaced the roof and installed security screens (You may have seen the commercial. They’re the ones that can’t be broken by a guy wielding a crowbar or bat) on all windows not covered by shutters. We also replaced the single pane windows with triple pane. You’d be amazed how much quieter it is inside the house these days.
But the real problem with having two houses is that once we get to one or the other, there’s usually a very long list of “honey do’s” lying in wait for us. This time around the pump on the well had failed and had to be pulled. And our thirteen year old fridge suddenly decided to be a two-door freezer. (Frozen grape tomatoes and frozen lettuce just aren’t my idea of wonderful.) As of Thursday we’ll be getting a replacement fridge and FINALLY the gas stovetop. Oh, and we’re putting a gas log fireplace in the wood-burning fireplace–a gaping hole in the living room wall that hasn’t had a fire in it for as long as we’ve lived here.
By now, you’re probably wondering, “Hey, wait a minute. Didn’t she say something about a lizard?” I did, but please remember I’m a novelist. My husband, the nice one, says that with me there are never any short stories—only long ones.
Here’s the deal, between the small fenced backyard next to the house and the far block wall on the edge of the property there exists a vast desert wasteland, and not a beautiful desert wasteland, either. For as long as we’ve been here it contained some scraggly mesquite, a deformed palo verde or two, some barrel cactus and prickly pear as well as a tangled forest of cholla. (People unfamiliar with the desert may look at “cholla” and think it’s pronounced Chol lah. Those folks would be wrong. Cholla is actually pronounced Choi Yah. Got it?) There were a few rock-strewn paths back there, but they were very rough, full of ankle-turning gopher holes, and yes, more cholla. Whenever I went walking in the cactus garden, using the term loosely, I was always worried about snakes. And because I usually wore sandals, I was forever getting stickers and/or gravel stuck in the soles of my feet. Now that I wear Sketchers most of the time, gravel and stickers no longer pose much of a problem, but I still worry about snakes. Just because we haven’ seen them doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
But this year, for our major project, we decided it was time to take in hand the part of the yard we call the “back back.”. For three weeks now we’ve had a two- to three-man crew working two days a week, trimming trees, dragging out dead cactus, and tearing away at that wicked forest of cholla. People don’t call it the “Jumping Cactus” for nothing.
It turns out, however, that when you’re disturbing that much flora, you’re bound to disturb some fauna as well.
On Sunday afternoon, Jojo, all 8.8 pounds of her, went streaking across the back yard and tore full speed into a bush in the far corner. In a flap of feathers and wings, a red-tailed hawk—close to the same size as the miniature dachshund—went pounding into the air from behind the same bush. An hour or so later, when Bill went outside to do his steps, he found the body of a recently deceased foot-long gecko lying just on the far side of the backyard fence. In his haste to flee the charging dog, the hawk lost his prize. As geckos go, this one was a beauty—iridescent green and blue in color. I suspect that he had probably spent decades living in what must have seemed to him a backyard paradise. Unfortunately our removal of all that cactus, robbed him of some of his cover and left him vulnerable to predators. I’m sorry about that—truly sorry.
The trees eventually will be better off for having been pruned. Once the paths are redefined and graveled, we’ll be bringing in more cactus and making the place more inviting to humans if not to lizards—even ones hunkered down and minding their own business.
But there is one piece of good news in all this. The HAWK got the lizard. It wasn’t Jojo or Bella. Having a prize-winning, bleeding corpse of a lizard land on my pillow that probably would have sent me completely ’round the bend, and that would never do.
Especially not when I’m supposed to be finishing a book.
Rest in Peace, Mr. Lizard. Sorry we never really knew you.