We\u2019ve owned our house in Tucson for the past fifteen years.\u00a0 That may be a misstatement.\u00a0 It\u2019s more likely the house has owned us.<\/p>\n
It was a project when we bought it\u2014a mid-century-not-so-modern\u2014that had been remodeled badly, several times, most recently by someone who had zero understanding of the term \u201cload-bearing walls\u201d and who had cut through them with wild abandon.\u00a0 The electrical service was a mess with 220 live wires twisted together without so much as a wire nut in sight.\u00a0\u00a0 The house, was in fact, one Bill Schilb away from the wrecking ball.\u00a0 We tackled the infrastructure first\u2014replacing the non-working AC system, cleaning the never-before-cleaned ductwork (Broke the duct cleaning guy\u2019s vacuum machine.\u00a0 He had to drag the first one away and come back with another!), and getting rid of the rooms\u2019 worth of incredibly filthy and decades old shag carpeting.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 I can tell you with the voice of experience, that live-in remodels are hell.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Whew!<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Natural gas was roughed in for the stove-top, but no gas cooktop was available right when it was needed.\u00a0 Instead, we ended up installing an electric infrared glass cooktop and pretty much hated it from day one.\u00a0 As for the granite slab countertops we\u2019d planned on?\u00a0 We were totally out of time by then, so we ended up laying granite tile on the countertops instead.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s damaged concrete\u00a0that was hell to walk on in bare feet.\u00a0 We replaced the pool heater, fixed the pool deck and hot tub, and extracted a jungle\u2019s worth of lantana from the pool yard.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 One day while driving through town, we spotted a pickup truck with a sign that said, the Irish Setter.\u00a0 We actually followed him to a stop light to get his phone number.\u00a0 He was a bricklayer who hailed from Ireland.\u00a0 We hired him almost on the spot.\u00a0 He and his crew built a five-foot tall block wall around the entire perimeter of the lot.<\/p>\n
Next up, we discovered that our lot came with water rights which we either had to use or lose.\u00a0 We hired a guy to dig the well, but it turned out he wasn\u2019t particularly good at it.\u00a0 That meant we had to hire someone else to drill a second well, one that actually works.\u00a0 We added landscaping here and there, including a wonderful Texas ruby grapefruit which we\u2019ve been enjoying for breakfast every day since we\u2019ve been here.\u00a0 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<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Last year we replaced the roof and installed security screens (You may have seen the commercial.\u00a0 They\u2019re the ones that can\u2019t be broken by a guy wielding a crowbar or bat) on all windows not covered by shutters.\u00a0 We also replaced the single pane windows with triple pane.\u00a0 You\u2019d be amazed how much quieter it is inside the house these days.<\/p>\n
But the real problem with having two houses is that once we get to one or the other, there\u2019s usually a very long list of \u201choney do\u2019s\u201d lying in wait for us.\u00a0 This time around the pump on the well had failed and had to be pulled.\u00a0 And our thirteen year old fridge suddenly decided to be a two-door freezer.\u00a0 (Frozen grape tomatoes and frozen lettuce just aren\u2019t my idea of wonderful.)\u00a0 As of Thursday we\u2019ll be getting a replacement fridge and FINALLY the gas stovetop.\u00a0 Oh, and we\u2019re putting a gas log fireplace in the wood-burning fireplace–a gaping hole in the living room wall that hasn\u2019t had a fire in it for as long as we\u2019ve lived here.<\/p>\n
By now, you\u2019re probably wondering, \u201cHey, wait a minute.\u00a0 Didn\u2019t she say something about a lizard?\u201d\u00a0 I did, but please remember I\u2019m a novelist.\u00a0 My husband, the nice one, says that with me there are never any short stories\u2014only long ones.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s 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.\u00a0 For as long as we\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 (People unfamiliar with the desert may look at \u201ccholla\u201d and think it\u2019s pronounced Chol lah.\u00a0 Those folks would be wrong.\u00a0 Cholla is actually pronounced Choi Yah.\u00a0 Got it?)\u00a0 There were a few rock-strewn paths back there, but they were very rough, full of ankle-turning gopher holes, and yes, more cholla.\u00a0 Whenever I went walking in the cactus garden, using the term loosely, I was always worried about snakes.\u00a0 And because I usually wore sandals, I was forever getting stickers and\/or gravel stuck in the soles of my feet.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Just because we haven\u2019 seen them doesn\u2019t mean they don\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
But this year, for our major project, we decided it was time to take in hand the part of the yard we call the \u201cback back.”.\u00a0 For three weeks now we\u2019ve 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.\u00a0 People don\u2019t call it the \u201cJumping Cactus\u201d for nothing.<\/p>\n
It turns out, however, that when you\u2019re disturbing that much flora, you\u2019re bound to disturb some fauna as well.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 In a flap of feathers and wings, a red-tailed hawk\u2014close to the same size as the miniature dachshund\u2014went pounding into the air from behind the same bush.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 In his haste to flee the charging dog, the hawk lost his prize.\u00a0 As geckos go, this one was a beauty\u2014iridescent green and blue in color.\u00a0 I suspect that he had probably spent decades living in what must have seemed to him a backyard paradise.\u00a0 Unfortunately our removal of all that cactus, robbed him of some of his cover and left him vulnerable to predators. I\u2019m sorry about that\u2014truly sorry.<\/p>\n
The trees eventually will be better off for having been pruned.\u00a0 Once the paths are redefined and graveled, we\u2019ll be bringing in more cactus and making the place more inviting to humans if not to lizards\u2014even ones hunkered down and minding their own business.<\/p>\n
But there is one piece of good news in all this.\u00a0 The HAWK got the lizard.\u00a0 It wasn\u2019t Jojo or Bella.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Especially not when I\u2019m supposed to be finishing a book.<\/p>\n
Rest in Peace, Mr. Lizard.\u00a0 Sorry we never really knew you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We\u2019ve owned our house in Tucson for the past fifteen years.\u00a0 That may be a misstatement.\u00a0 It\u2019s more likely the house has owned us. It was a project when we bought it\u2014a mid-century-not-so-modern\u2014that had been remodeled badly, several times, most recently by someone who had zero understanding of the term \u201cload-bearing walls\u201d and who had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[76,110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pets","category-tucson"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-i6","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1123,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1122\/revisions\/1123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}