Life on the Vine

One of the first books I read this year was A Place in the World by Frances Mayes.  In it she writes of buying her house Bramasole in Italy that: "I thought that living in my house would be my way into a life in Italy, and that turned out to be right." (124) "My way into a life...." At the time I read it, that line struck me and I folded the corner of the page so that I could find it again.  That idea of a house helping you find your way into your life is how I feel about our new house here in southeastern Arizona. For the first time ever I have what might be considered a 'forever' home.  This home -- IS IT.  Tom jokes that the only way he's moving off the hill is in a hearse.  As a military brat and having my own civilian career with the military, I have lived in 7 states, 3 countries, and had 16 homes.  My parents have moved too so there was never a childhood home.  We've owned this property for 12 years and spent the past 10 years working toward...

I was trying to figure out what to name this post and settled on "Three Exciting Deliveries".  It seemed fitting.  We've had the delivery of the house.  The delivery of our household items from Italy.  And the 'delivery' of another heeler.  I guess you can even say we've recently celebrated the delivery of yours truly!  It's been a busy couple months.  So now to the blog post. I recently celebrated my birthday, and I have firmly arrived in middle life.  At 45 I am exactly halfway through my 40s and halfway towards my 50s. The morning of my birthday Tom and I sat at our newly-acquired dining room table drinking coffee and sketching out plans for our garage and courtyard.  As we were talking, Tom asked me if I "felt" old, wondering if my increasing age was bothering me.  I told him that "I'm old" are words he will probably never hear me say.  At least not for another twenty or thirty years.  I might cop to "I'm getting older...

On May 16, with less than three weeks left in Italy, we FINALLY closed escrow on the house we'll be putting on the property we've owned for 12 years in southeastern Arizona.  Securing and closing on the financing was a yearlong process and it took FOUR notarized signings before we finally closed the deal.  YAY! Back in 2013, after it became painfully clear that we had no reasonable funding options to build the house we had worked with an architect to design, we began work with Cavco on doing a manufactured house.  We settled on a Santa Fe style home and we've fortunately been able to make some personalized changes to the floor plan.  It's something they've stopped doing because of the high production demand but fortunately our house made it in under the wire.     On our property, in the years before we moved to Italy, we laid some ground work.  We pulled in electric, put in the septic tank, dug the well, cut in the road, and had the construction site ...