Last weekend was the Tucson Festival of Books. My daughter and I flew out of Seattle after a serious windstorm and prior to a snow storm. We didn’t come back home until after the snow had vanished. In other words, unlike last year, we clearly dodged the weather bullet this time around. As for the festival itself? It was amazing.

After participating in every TFOB since its inception, including the remote one in 2020, going there is very much like going home. One of the things I’ve really missed in the past few years, starting with Covid, is the ability to interact with my readers. That’s something the festival gives me in spades. And, as someone in my eighties with certain physical issues, it was gratifying to be treated as a cherished antique.

Some of you may remember a misadventure at a previous book festival in Florida where the stage was a good eighteen inches off the ground with no ramp or steps in between. With the audience already seated, it literally took three men and a boy to heave me up onto the stage. So in Tucson, I was incredibly gratified to have steps with sturdy hand-rails leading up to and off the stages. I also appreciated having chairs with arms for the banquet, panels, and signings. As that old song from the Fifties says, little things really do mean a lot!

TFOB, located on the University of Arizona Campus (BEAR DOWN!) is now and always has been free. It runs on generous sponsors (Lots of them!), the people who pay for booths, and volunteers—literally hundreds of them. (I seem to be using the word literally a lot in this post, but so be it!) The money that comes in goes to support any number of reading-related charities, including an organization called Literacy Connects whose volunteer coaches teach reading skills to adults.

Some of you may remember a post years ago where I spoke of meeting a woman named Marcia who, at age 49, had turned to Literacy Connects to learn how to read because she wanted to be able to read stories to her grandkids. Growing up as a dyslexic in a Hispanic family where English was definitely a second language, Marcia attended school year after year without ever learning to read. That reality impacted every aspect of her adult life, including limiting the kinds of jobs she was able to land.

Years ago, she attended a book signing at a Barnes and Noble in Tucson, walking into the room with the wariness of someone who’s just been dropped in enemy territory. Once there, however, she told me her story, including the fact that she and her Literacy Connects coach were using MY books as textbooks in her journey of learning to read.

Since then, I’ve encountered Marcia at TFOBs where she’s updated me on her progress. She’s caught up on the Bradys now and is working her way through the Beaumonts. Someone asked her once why she didn’t just listen to the audio versions. “No,” she said, “I want to read every word!”

This time when I saw her she said, “You’re never going to believe this.” “Believe what?” I asked. “I’ve started a book club, and we’re all reading your Walker Family books.” “Does your book club have a name?” I asked. “No,”she answered. “We just call it the book club.” Naturally I gave it a name—I had to. It’s now called the Late Comer’s Book Club!”

So yes, going to TFOB really was like going home. That’s the “can” part of the title. Now for the “can’t.”

When my family departed South Dakota in 1949, there were only five of us—my parents, my two older sisters, and me. We left the farm on the 28th of January when the temperature was twenty-eight below zero. We headed out pulling an overweight trailer that was loaded down with 300 quarts of my mother’s previous summer’s-worth of canning. We made that trek on the advance cusp of a fierce blizzard that shut down portions of the Midwest for months on end. (I refrained from using another literally but just barely!). We spent five days snowbound in Enid, Oklahoma, before finally arrive in Bisbee, Arizona, in mid February.

For the next several weeks, we stayed in the Shady Dell Trailer Park (It’s still there.) while my folks negotiated buying the house at 16 Yuma Trail. Our actual move-in occurred in the middle of March. I was young enough that I didn’t have to work on the move-in process. Instead, I remember walking over to the wrought-iron fence on the east side of the yard, hanging on the uprights, staring up at an incredibly blue sky, and feeling the sun all over my body. That’s the day I fell in love with Arizona, and believe it or not, that fence is still there.

At the time, Bisbee had two separate water systems. One was for drinking. The other one, for outside-use only, was free. It consisted of mineral rich water that was pumped out of the mines, and it made the whole town look like an oasis—including the yard of our house at 16 Yuma Trail. We had trees, including an immense mulberry tree which was great for climbing. During barefoot summers, the soles of our feet were stained purple with berries from that tree. We also had numerous fruit trees—peach, apricot, and fig. (My mother spent the last of the summer months canning like crazy.) We also had plenty of lush green grass which had to be mowed with a push mower, not easy on a steeply slanted lawn.

The house is where I grew up is still standing, but times have changed, and now what was once a wonderful home has morphed into an eyesore. The trees are mostly gone. There’s a renegade cottonwood that I never met before and a pine tree that my dad dragged home years ago in a five gallon bucket. It was tiny then. Now it towers over the house.

The problem is, for the past number of years, the place has belonged to someone who’s most likely a hoarder. Every inch of the yard, the sidewalk out front, and probably the house itself are all full of junk. This past week 16 Yuma Trail made the local news. After years of sending warnings, the City of Bisbee finally had enough. They sent a cleanup crew—for the outside of the house at least—and have now placed a lien against the house to cover the cost of the cleanup.

The online article included a link to a photo. Presumably, it was taken prior to the cleanup. The front of the house is the part where my mother and younger brother jumpstarted a long-delayed remodel by chiseling down the now-missing outside wall that separated the house from the two sun rooms and front porch that been there previously. FYI, the row of four windows on the righthand side are where my sister Janie’s and my shared bedroom was.

Clearly I can no longer go home to 16 Yuma Trail. The building still exists, but the only way to access the loving home we had there once is through my heart and soul, and those memories will always be happy ones. As for the Tucson Festival of Books? This past weekend 145,000 people, including yours truly, went home to that.

See there? You really can and can’t go home again.

I’m living proof.