April 20th, 2006
“Mom, mom!” Krissi cried as she ran through the front door and into the kitchen where I was making bread. “Mom, mom! Grandpa is putting a for sale sign up in our front yard!”
I dropped the dough I was kneading on the counter and turned around in surprise.
Kami rushed in the kitchen just then, a look of horror on her face that matched Krissi's.
“He is, mom, he really is,” she exclaimed in answer to my look of disbelief. “Grandpa really is putting up a for sale sign in our front yard!”
Rubbing the flour off my hands, I followed my two daughters back out front to see what they were talking about. Sure enough, there was dad, pounding a metal stake into our lawn by the mailbox. Attached to it was a metal sign with FOR SALE written on it in bold letters.
I swallowed hard, then walked over to my father. “So you're really going to do this,” I said, trying to keep my voice light.
“Yes,” Dad answered between pounds. “I need to move mom up to Snowflake.”
I spent the rest of the afternoon trying to calm the girls down. They were beside themselves, crying and carrying on about having to leave their friends and school, wondering where they would go.
“Grandpa's not going to sell the house today,” I assured them, holding them close and trying to make them feel better. “It takes a long time to sell a house. You'll finish this year in school, for sure, and then we'll see. Maybe if grandpa sells the house we can move someplace you like even better than this.”
Kami was in 5th grade, Krissi in 4th, and neither one of them could imagine finding a better place to live than the home they had been born in. Personally, neither could I, but what could I do?
Dad had built our house sixteen years earlier, when I was a single mother raising five children on my own. He built a complete house for us in front and a complete house for him and mom on the side, with a huge adjoining living room between the two of them. Three years later, when I married Moe, we decided to stay there, mostly for the kids sake, but also because I loved living with my parents and couldn't imagine moving anywhere else. Kami and Krissi were born a few years later, and the older children grew up and moved away, but everyone came home for holidays and family gatherings, most of them every week. What would we do when we moved?
Then mom had to have quadruple by-pass surgery. She was doing better, but it had scared dad. My brother-in-law, Alan, who was a doctor up in Snowflake, had suggested they move up there so he could help take care of mom. Dad was grasping at straws, but he was willing to do anything to hold onto mother for a few more years.
I finally got Kami and Krissi settled down late that evening, but it began all over again the next morning when my oldest daughter, Linnea, came over to bring her kids for Grandma Day.
“Mom!” she wailed as she walked in the front door. “Why is there a for sale sign in the front yard?”
I had to explain all over again, and spent the next few hours trying to calm down Linnea, assuring her everything would be all right. I sure wished I felt as calm I as tried to sound. The problem was, inside I was kind of freaking out, as well. What would we do? Where would we go? Although I had dreamed of moving to Snowflake myself some day, Moe was only 61and he couldn't retire for at least two years.
Just the same, I started looking for house plans and tried to figure out what we could do. I finally came to the conclusion that I would be OK moving in with Moe's parents for a little while, if we had to. They had offered for us to come live with them, but they only had a tiny two bedroom house in the middle of an orange grove at the foot of the San Tan Mountains. Their home was old, rickety, and not in very good shape.
Moe's mother had suffered a stroke the previous year, and was totally dependent on his dad to take care of her. He did the best he could, but he wasn't in much better shape. I went out weekly to clean for them, but even with that the house smelled strongly of urine. It was too much for grandpa to wash grandma's sheets every day, so he just “aired them out”. I showed him how to use disposable pads to cover her mattress, but the damage had already been done, and the smell was so strong it made my eyes burn.
“It will be OK,” I told myself sternly whenever I thought about living there. “It wouldn't be any different from going on a mission to some third world country, and you always thought that would be a great adventure.”
Just the same, I really hoped that our house wouldn't sell too quickly.
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