Saint Raven
I deftly scoop the manure with my rake and drop the green-brown balls into my red poop cart. I hear Sox flap his lips as he scoops his morning supplement from the bin hanging in his paddock. From his other end, he delivers a new pile of manure for me. Sox always poops while he eats. Gracie, the tidier of the two, leaves her paddock while I clean. When I finish, she returns and starts in on her breakfast. For Gracie, eating and pooping are activities that she carefully separates by time and location.
I hear coyotes howling in the distance. It’s morning, but they’re probably returning to their dens after a night of hunting. It’s not yet 7:30 and I have all the chores done–the horse chores, that is. Other chores await back at the house. It’s the life I always wanted, and it’s mine!
My husband and I live at the base of the Santa Catalina Mountains just north of Tucson, Arizona. We’re in our early to mid sixties. Two years ago, we left behind a life in California–a city life–for the land of scorpions, cactus and rattlesnakes. I love it, and my San-Francisco-born husband has almost, but not quite, gotten used to the quiet.
Gracie
Back in the house, I look out the window and see Gracie, my gray quarter horse, surveying her domain. She stands and looks toward the mountains where the sun is rising over Mount Lemmon. Today she’ll take it easy. Yesterday my husband, Richard, and I trailered Sox and Gracie to Catalina State Park where we rode through mesquite and cactus for several hours. Having the horses here completes our new lives.
We live on a nearly 1 1/2-acre of sloping desert landscape. The horse corral is the first thing I see when I come home. Our little brown stucco house sits back from the front edge of our property. At night if the lights are off, you can’t see the house at all. Living here is like hiding in plain sight.
Yellow Bells
Nineteen flagstones guide us from the driveway to the front gate–the gate that convinced me the house should be ours. Made of iron, with a hunk of crystal amethyst and an iron appliqué of a lizard–or maybe a dragon–decorating the rusty metal, this gate opens into our secret garden–the courtyard within where pots are filled with cactus, Mexican petunia, succulents and yellow bells. In the morning and evening the flower-filled pots are visited by hummingbirds.
The house is small, but just right for us. We’re almost ready to give up the now-extra items we still have in storage. We’ve scaled down and outgrown some of the excess. When we open the door, our three Australian shepherds greet us: good old Rosie, Oscar (also known as Mr. April), and Finny (Huckleberry Finn). Rosie is almost fifteen and the two boys, the minis, are four and one. In the bedroom, on my pillow, lies Nica the Chica, our hairless Chihuahua-and-whatever mix.
We painted our house inside and out with the colors of the desert: sand with a turquoise ceiling, light beige with a cactus-green ceiling, granite pink and stock horse brown. A blue, red and orange tile replica of the dragon on the gate decorates a wall. A painting I call “Saint Raven” adorns a large wall. Saint Raven is a dark-haired, haloed madonna offering up an armful of ravens bound with a red ribbon.
In the evenings, Richard and I recline in the front yard on our lounge chairs with a glass of prosecco–saluting the mountains, the quail that pluck the blossoms off our salvia and the rabbits that ravage our lantana. I love even the rattlesnakes that occasionally give us a fright and the scorpions that sometimes creep into the house.
I still can’t believe we’re here.
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