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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I started attending Bisbee High School in 1958, it was at the \u201cold high school\u201d up in Old Bisbee. \u00a0That entailed a bus ride on city buses, (seven cents on and seven cents off) from Warren up to the old part of Bisbee. \u00a0The bus put kids out at the bottom of Main Street. \u00a0From there it was a hike up School Hill to get to the school itself. \u00a0At the time, Bisbee High\u2019s four-story building was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records due to the fact that all four floors were \u201cground\u201d floors. \u00a0That\u2019s what happens when you perch a building on the side of a hill.<\/p>\n
By the time Christmas break ended that year, construction on the new edition of Bisbee High on School Terrace Road down in Warren was complete and that\u2019s where we went from then on\u2014the new school. \u00a0By the way, it\u2019s currently coming up on the 60th anniversary of that move from the old school to the new one, and that\u2019s how people in Bisbee still refer to those two separate buildings\u2014the \u201cold\u201d school and the \u201cnew\u201d school.<\/p>\n
Once BHS moved to Warren, using city buses no longer worked for the kids who lived in that part of town. \u00a0So how did we get there? \u00a0Underclassmen, the freshman and sophomore boys who didn\u2019t have driver\u2019s licenses and freshman and sophomore girls who didn\u2019t have upperclassmen as boyfriends, were reduced to using what my mother liked to call \u201cshank\u2019s mare\u201d or, in other words, “get off your duff and walk.” \u00a0(I started to say get off your \u201cbutt\u201d and walk, but trust me, Evie Busk would never have used the word butt, at least not in public.) \u00a0Come to think of it, I have no idea how my mother, a woman of Swedish origin who was born in South Dakota became acquainted with the term \u201cshank\u2019s mare,\u201d which, according to Siri, hails from somewhere in Scotland, but learn it she did, and she liked using it, too.<\/p>\n
I was six feet tall in seventh grade. \u00a0You can bet your bippy that I wasn\u2019t one of the girls with a boyfriend in the junior or senior class who would drive me back and forth to school, so I walked.<\/p>\n
An Internet search tells me that the distance between the house on Yuma Trail and 325 School Terrace Road is 1.3 miles. Funny, I always thought it was a lot farther than that, mostly up hill, and mostly in the snow, right? \u00a0According to Siri\u2019s walking notes, it\u2019s mostly flat and should take approximately 27 minutes, give or take.<\/p>\n
I would walk down Yuma Trail, turn left on Arizona Street, right on Congdon, and eventually I\u2019d end up on School Terrace Road. The Congdon part of the journey crossed the Vista, which consists of two streets, East Vista and West Vista, on either side and facing \u00a0a long, narrow park. \u00a0In the old days that was the part of town where the local gentry lived\u2014the copper company bosses, the doctors, attorneys, and judges.<\/p>\n
Two of the attorneys who lived on the Vista were a father and son duo named Moore. \u00a0The house belonging to Mr. Moore, the elder, was on the corner of West Vista and Congdon. \u00a0The house was constructed of brick that had been painted white. \u00a0The exterior sported bright green trim and a deeply shaded front porch. \u00a0Part of what shaded the porch was the simple fact that the house faced east rather than west. \u00a0Nonetheless, a good part of the shade came from a gnarled old wisteria plant that had grown up next to the porch\u2019s outside corner.<\/p>\n
Through the winter, as I walked back and forth to school, the gray bark on the wisteria made it look as though it was dead as can be. \u00a0Then spring would come and the gray branches would be transformed into a thing of beauty, with lush lavender flowers drooping down like immense bunches of grapes. \u00a0I was enchanted. \u00a0I loved those flowers then and always wanted to have some of my own. \u00a0Now I do.<\/p>\n
That took time\u2014decades even. \u00a0The arbor at the bottom of the steps leading into the back garden is covered with two separate wisteria plants\u2014not as old and gnarled as the one at the Moore’s house on the Vista, but lush and beautiful all the same.<\/p>\n
A couple of times over the years we returned from wintering in Tucson too late and came home to find that the wisteria had already bloomed. \u00a0This year it was so cold for so long, that it has yet to bloom. \u00a0It\u2019s starting to show hints of lavender, but no real color yet.<\/p>\n
Since we\u2019re leaving on a cruise in a little under two weeks, I\u2019m worried. \u00a0I don\u2019t want it to bloom while we\u2019re gone. \u00a0So I\u2019m not waiting for Godot right now; I\u2019m waiting for the wisteria.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve loved wisteria for sixty some years now, and I don\u2019t want to miss it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I started attending Bisbee High School in 1958, it was at the \u201cold high school\u201d up in Old Bisbee. \u00a0That entailed a bus ride on city buses, (seven cents on and seven cents off) from Warren up to the old part of Bisbee. \u00a0The bus put kids out at the bottom of Main Street. […]<\/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":[110],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tucson"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3nsBA-pL","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1597","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=1597"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1597\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1602,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1597\/revisions\/1602"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jajance.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}