One day shortly after we
arrived in Santa Fe, Grace announced that she had set up a tour of available
homes with “our” realtor.
Feeling a bit steamrollered, I
protested, “OUR realtor?”
“Yes, it was what you wanted to
do,” she said. “As I remember you
mentioned it 10 minutes and 14 seconds into our conversation three weeks
ago. The talk began with you
complimenting my legs, hips and breasts as we got dressed for that dreadful
movie you had to see.”
I was lost. If my mind was on her legs, hips or
chest, my thought processes were at their most primitive and I might have
agreed to anything, including donating a kidney to Rush Limbaugh. As far as
remembering a bad movie we saw, I review films and see many, many awful
ones. She would just have to be
more specific than that.
Our realtor, Jonathan Carlton,
a gentle, dapper man, took us to eight homes on the first day of searching, but
he could have stopped after we saw the second house.
It was in a huge development
called El Dorado, a former ranch where each home sat on its own two- or three-acre
plot, but the houses could only occupy a small portion of its land. This meant, with hundreds of homes,
each one was far from its neighbors.
El Dorado combined a sense of community with privacy.
The two-bedroom adobe home had
a large, presentational living room topped by a beamed ceiling. The ceiling was so high and the
beams so sturdy that we could hold lynchings in our living room. Not that we would want to do that.
The 4,000 square foot, mature garden,
which was a riot of purple flowers, could be seen from the windows in the
master bedroom and living room.
The garden was surrounded by a coyote fence of juniper poles lashed
together with wire and attached to large adobe posts.
Seeing that, led to the question:
just how many coyotes do you have around here?
Jonathan’s
answer: “Not that many, but you don’t want them in the garden.” Or the living room!
Beyond the
fence, we could see a rolling line of mountains extending to the horizon in all
directions, amazing and beautiful to a guy who grew up around flat (except for
skyscrapers) Chicago.
In one corner of the living
room, there was a kiva fireplace, a version of a pioneer fireplace that was a
semi-circle of adobe extending out from one corner. The opening was rather small and was hooded by adobe that
narrowed as it neared the ceiling. It looked like a dwelling for a height-challenged (and
quite sooty) garden gnome.
The
bedroom, with its own kiva fireplace, looked out on a hot tub, its deck and
beyond to the wood-branch coyote fence which surrounded the garden.
The guest
bedroom or office was at the end of an “L”-shaped hallway at the far end of the
home away from the master bedroom.
This hallway had half a dozen semi-circular niches suitable for pottery,
knick- knacks or the saints which local artisans enjoy carving. It was a wonderful home that fit our
needs, except that real estate prices were beginning to dive. Couldn’t we save a lot of money if we
bought the home in a few years when the market hit bottom?
No, replied
Grace, because then this home would not be for sale. Alas, on a certain level (not the level involved in saving a
lot of money) her logic was unassailable.
No comments:
Post a Comment