so...i arrived at my friend Janes. my friend from when i was seventeen years old, my friend Jane who felt most like family to me. she lived on 45 acres in Cheshire Oregon. it slanted upward, gently from her home. beautiful land. and the thought was that i would build a Yurt there, in the Far Back of those acres.
but soon, after i arrived, her husband, a firefighter, a HotShot, told her he wanted a divorce. so...not my own unforseen, but hers
and i needed to find something different. i bought the Avion, which is a People's version of an Airstream. and took it to a mountain, a little over a half way up, in Horton Oregon. no electricity. no running water except for a mountain stream. it was a wonderland. i went to the Artists Market in Eugene on the weekends and set up my booth there, selling the fiber figures i made all week. and the drizzle. the drizzle, wore me FLAT. then the two maybe, stellar months of the most perfect place in the world, and then the drizzle. the fog. the mud. and at the Market i met some people who owned land in Snowflake Arizona. ok. and i went there.
they had inherited the land. there were two houses. no one had lived in them for years. full of stuff. in the morning i would be awakened by HUGE cattle rubbing themselves on the side of the little Airstream to itch...and i think as i write this, just like the Goats do....! and i would sit on the roof of one of the homes there every morning and watch the coyotes run rabbits. watch the life and death. the kill. listen to it. on the roof of the house. the people said i could live there forever. they had no use for desert anymore. and all it took really, was hauling water. no water. and i walked the arroyos endlessly and found that gasket thing that hangs today in the ROOM in one of those arroyos. and i sat. LONG hours under scrub trees and called my daughter from the pay phone at the laundromat in Snowflake. after a while, one of those conversations: she had had a second baby. could i come back? she wanted to go to the junior college there. could i come?
i remember driving back. it was i guess in the fall. because it was hunting season. deer would flee across the "blue highways" i drove...suddenly, lunging out. deer in headlights. it's an expression that might have fit all of us at that time. so...
for a while i stayed with her. i shared my granddaughter's room. she had a bunk bed. i got the top.
it didn't work out all that great and i think i lived in 4 different places. that didn't work out all that great. They say you can never go home again. and i couldn't. so after almost a year, i LEFT again.