We Got To Live In Snowflake!

Dad sold our house in the middle of September. After all the months of worrying, working, and trying to find a buyer, it was a relief when it finally sold. Funny, that eighteen months earlier I had found the idea of moving so horrific.

We still didn't know where we would live. The house was scheduled to close the end of October. Moe thought maybe we should find a place to rent in Gilbert for the rest of the school year, but I really wanted to move up to Snowflake. I was so done with the heat. After fifty-one years of living in the Valley of the Sun, I was ready to go anywhere cooler, and the thought of living someplace where it actually snowed once in a while was enthralling!

Eventually we would build a house on our five acres west of Snowflake, but we couldn't start without money, which we wouldn't have until the house sold, which is when we needed somewhere to live. Since my sister and her family had moved in with mom and dad, living with them in their new house was no longer an option, so where should we go?

Little by little the days crept by. I mowed the lawns, cleaned the house, fed my family and did the laundry, but I also began collecting cardboard boxes, sorted through our belongings, and made piles of things to keep and things to get rid of.

“People ought to move every few years,” I told my neighbor one afternoon after spending hours cleaning out shelves in one of the extra bedrooms. “It's the best way I know to de-clutter and de-junk your house.”

One day in the middle of September Alyssa used my oven to bake a spice cake. She and Matt were staying with us while they built a new house in Queen Creek. Alyssa was expecting her second baby, and had a doctors appointment, so I told her I'd watch her cake and take it out when it was done. It smelled so good! It made me think of fall and the holidays, and wonder what our fall would be like that year. Where would we be on Halloween, or Thanksgiving, or for that matter, Christmas?

We went up to Snowflake the third weekend in September, just to look around and see what was available up there to rent. I found an advertisement in the newspaper for a house that was only a block away from mom and dad, so I went for a walk early Saturday morning to check it out. It was delightful!

The house was not large, but big enough for Moe and me and the girls. It was almost new, with a nice fenced in yard with green grass and three huge old trees in the front. It was so cute I fell in love with it immediately, and knew it was where I wanted to live. That afternoon we met with the owners and walked through the house. It was tiny, but just right for us. Best of all, although not cheap, it was affordable, and Moe liked it, too.

Just that easily, my wondering and worrying was over. We would move to Snowflake during fall break, which would make a good time for the girls to change schools. Moe would finish his last year working down in the Valley, living at his dad's during the week, coming up to Snowflake for the weekends, which wasn't ideal, but it would work. And me? At last I would get to leave the desert, the heat, the dryness, and realize my dream of living in the mountains. It was almost like getting to move to the cabin, something I had fantasized doing ever since I was a little girl, and although it meant leaving behind my friends, my married children, and everything I was used to, I was as happy as a kid.

Mom and the Cabin

          Mom was always a good sport about going to the cabin, but I wonder if she ever really liked it as much as we did.  It meant a lot of work for her. 
          First there was the shopping and planning ahead of time to make sure she had everything we would need.  It took an hour and a half to get to Payson from the cabin, so we didn't run into town often.  There was a tiny store in Young, which was only half an hour away, but they didn't have very much to buy, and it was expensive and sometimes of questionable freshness, (like the time we bought boxes of Cracker Jacks, only to find them crawling with weevils when we opened them up).  Mom tried to plan ahead and make sure she brought everything we would need with us to begin with.
           Then, there was the job of packing enough clothes and personal items for a family of six, then seven when Julie was born, and finally eight after Sharon came along.  Just bringing enough diapers and blankets and baby clothes was a daunting task.
            Once we got to the cabin Dad helped bring in the boxes and bags, but Mom had to unpack and put away all the groceries, clothes, and everything else we'd brought up with us.  But first she had to wipe down the kitchen counters and shelves, plug in the refrigerator and make sure it was clean, take the dust covers off the beds and make them up with fresh bedding, sweep the floors in case there were mouse droppings or bits of the crystalline mouse poison Dad always put out before we left, and generally clean up the cabin.  Of course, we kids each had our own little job to do, but getting the cabin ready to live in mostly fell on Mom's shoulders.
             After we got unpacked and settled in Mom got to relax and enjoy our vacation too, although it was still more work than being at home.  She never complained, though, and I know she liked having time to sit and read or paint, or do whatever craft she was working on at the time.  But time seemed to fly at the cabin, and it was never long enough before it was time to repack, re-clean, and head on back down to the Valley.  And then the work really began.
             Once we got home Dad and us kids unpacked the car and carried everything into the house, but it mostly got dumped on the service porch floor, where Mom got to sort through everything, ending up with piles and piles of dirty laundry for her to wash.  It only took the rest of us a few minutes to get back to normal life once we got home.  It took mom an entire day to clean all our clothes and get things back to normal.
            I never really realized until I was a mom myself how much work mom went to so we could go to the cabin.  She sacrificed so much to make us happy, and she never complained or acted like she didn't want to go.  I had a wonderful mother!