Circling Around to Home Again

I posted on Facebook a week ago about a trip I had taken, just a day trip  around the county where I toured basically all the places I have lived in the area since I arrived on July 18, 1970 straight from Flagstaff and completion of my graduate studies at NAU. (Northern Arizona University--there are a couple of other institutions that use that name I have found.) I even shared photos so I will put them up here too and add more to the brief comments I made on FB. This post will be both a spin off and a partial continuation of my home and houses thread.

On a Saturday morning, July 18,  I loaded a Ryder Ford Econoline van and headed south to my new job at Fort Huachuca, AZ. I think my sponsor had already arranged an apartment for me for at least a temporary landing pad. My Flagstaff roomie went with me and she drove the van back to Flag since I had done a local rental.

My residence in the Cortez apartments was a one bedroom on the second floor. On the basis of my standards and experiences at the time it seemed pretty ritzy! I did some decorating and the curtains in the window along with the stickers there were part of that effort. There was even a big collage of Marlboro men clipped from magazines and glued on a sheet of brown wrapping paper hung over my bed! I had a living room with a dining area, a small kitchen, a good sized bedroom with a closet and a full bath all to myself! I think I actually stayed there until late September when I had to move to more economical digs. In the interim I acquired my very first automobile. Payments for it were taking a large bite out of my salary.

Cold reality set in and I knew I had to live cheaper. The next brief home was in El Corral Trailer Park. I think it was on Seventh Street but I am no longer sure. The town was much smaller then and a great deal has changed. I cannot even find where it was now since so many houses and apartments have been built in nearly fifty years! Oddly when the park was closed a decade or so late, my parents were at Duncan and had gotten a disaster FEMA mobile after one of the area's drastic floods. They needed more room and bought a trailer from the park which was very similar to the one I'd rented but a three bedroom plan instead of two.

Late in November I decided on yet another move and my roommate, a former pen pal who had just come over from California, went with me to hunt places in Bisbee. We found a quaint spot in the old Warren district and rented it for $30 a month! That move proved very significant as I have probably said before. This unit had two bedrooms, a living room, an eat-in kitchen and a bath. Not as spiffy as the Sierra Vista one but the fact it looked outwardly like a set from a Spaghetti Western got my attention. We moved in over the Thanksgiving weekend. I took a photo of it as it is today last week.  It's right below for contrast.
You can see it has not changed a lot. The second door is gone and there is new plaster color but otherwise, same-o same-o!

Anyway by late spring I got acquainted with my next door neighbor, now a single dad who was a sergeant on the Bisbee Police Department and had a six year old daughter I'd already met since she came to greet Judy and me wearing her cat as we were moving in.  He and I started keeping company that summer and decided it was practical to combine forces and stop paying double rent. The move was easy, simply across a single car space been the apartment row and the similar detached house. Over a week or so boxes were transferred, some stored in the basement area underneath the house and the vows and a ring happened to make it legal. That was the last time I moved by myself--Judy had gone to other quarters--and the last time with virtually no furniture to be concerned with. By the time we left this home in the fall of 1973 when we moved to Colorado, I had meshed into a very different life as a wife and mother, albeit a 'wicked' step mother!

Civil service gypsies for a bit,  we lived in Falcon, CO--the little house on the prairie . Olivehurst, CA--at the edge of the rice fields. a brief stop on Sylvosa Street in Tucson and finally back to almost the start, Whetstone, AZ at the crossroads of highways 90 and 82 in the spring of 1984.


 We lived on Old Church Rd and our house was the old church which had never been sanctified and was eventually made into a rather unique home. These photos show it as we looked before buying and as some change happened over the next twenty plus years. To date I  have never lived anyplace longer.

I had planted roses and such wherever I lived and of course each time left them. I really planned to stay on Old Church Road 'forever' but sometimes fate intervenes. I left much I work had done there when I moved out in August 2008 and was semi-homeless for awhile.

My old adobe hacienda has greatly changed since then and I no longer identify with it at all. The spirit of my home may still be in there somewhere but I cannot see it now. The old saying "you can't go  home again," surely holds true there. I am so thankful I have a new and easy-to-love home just up the highway about 30 miles that I was able to come home to after my trip down memory lane.  As spring comes new roses and other pretties will be planted and it already feels like a true home.