Left in Tucson - Departure 11-23-2016


It was with truly a heavy heart that Jim and I said our tearful good-byes to Tucson on Wednesday before Thanksgiving 2016, as our U-Haul truck headed out of town and onto I-10 for the two-day drive through New Mexico and Texas to our new home base in Sherwood AR, part of the Little Rock AR metro area. While traveling by truck may have slowed the journey, it afforded us more time to savor the clear weather and light traffic through Dallas on Thanksgiving Day.  We arrived in North Little Rock late in the evening on Thanksgiving Day, having enjoyed a traditional turkey dinner at Cracker Barrel in Weatherford, TX.  So glad that Cracker Barrel was opened for us and the hundreds who also chose to join us at the Weatherford CB for Thanksgiving dinner.

Nine years ago, when I arrived in Tucson with all my worldly belongings from central New Jersey to join Jim on a new life adventure, I was filled more with excitement than trepidation.  Sure, I had vacationed in AZ and visited Jim in Tucson multiple times during the previous year while we searched for a suitable house, but it was still just plain amazing that we were really living here - in the desert, in this place filled with Spanish, Mexican and Cowboy Western history. The joke was, before the move I had lamented to Jim that after spending my entire life learning and espousing about the American history to be found everywhere in New Jersey and along the east coast, there probably wouldn't be much "real" history to learn about in southern Arizona.  After all, Arizona hadn't become a state until 1912!  I had completely ignored all that time Arizona was part of Spain and Mexico and a U.S. Territory.  We spent 9 years in our Tucson house collecting lots of experiences, memories, and most of all a bunch of very dear friends.  It may have taken them a little longer to warm up to us Easterners than we were used to but in time we felt truly embraced and blessed by them all.



We will do our best to stay in touch with our Tucson Tribe and hope they will visit us in AR from time to time.


Happy trails, until we meet again,
Beverly Maddalone







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's a Swamp Box?

Image
One thing you notice as soon as you start driving around Tucson is the many  beige-colored metal boxes  you see sitting on the roofs of houses all over town.   Some look pretty neglected and rusted out.   At first glance, you might mistake them for air conditioning units, and they are, sort of.   They are often referred to as “Swamp Boxes” by the locals.   A Swamp Box is what the heating and cooling industry calls an Evaporative Cooler.   It works much like a home humidifier.   The cooler contains a basin of water and a rotating drum with a foam pad.   Air is blown over the wet pad and into the house to produce cool moist air.   With an A/C unit, humidity is sucked out of the interior air in the cooling process, whereas with a swamp cooler humidity is blown into the interior air.   Since Tucson is a desert climate with very little humidity, for most of the warm season, an A/C unit is of little use.   The locals who have lived with their quirky swamp coolers since the 1960’s, like to
Read more

Desert Fruit

What distinguishes our Tucson home from all the rest in our post-WWII tract-home development are the two stately olive trees that grace our front yard. Our property is the only one in the neighborhood that retains its original curbside olive trees. When our development, and others just like it all over Tucson, were first built, its streets were lined with olive trees.  Over time, the trees died or were chopped down my homeowners who found the trees to be more of a nuisance than a distinctive shade tree.  The city of Tucson has since band the planting of fruit-bearing olive trees anywhere in the city.  Olive trees have a nasty habit of producing tremendous amounts of pollen and dropping huge numbers of olives all over sidewalks and streets. Believe me when I tell you that fallen olives will turn a sidewalk into a slippery purple-black mess. They are so bitter that the birds won't even eat them. People who come to the desert to get relief from their pollen allergies, have little appr
Read more

Figaro - Growing Figs in Tucson

Not long after settling into our new place in Tucson, I discovered a garden center just down the street that specialized in native plants.  Great!  I could now start learning how to identify and name all the local desert flora.  As I browsed the aisles and started noting names on the tags of the most interesting plants, I found my way over to the fruit tree section.  Just beyond the lemons, oranges, and grapefruit trees, I spotted an aisle of trees that looked surprisingly familiar. Could they be? Was it possible?  Was I really seeing rows of fig trees? Yes! They were truly fig trees. I had never expected to find fig trees growing in Tucson.  It was early September, and the figs were just beginning to ripen. Unfortunately, some trees were infested with fig beetles.  Fig beetles are gigantic iridescent purplish black things the size of a cockroach.  When they begin to feast on a fig, they swarm on that one precious fig until they are hanging from it like a bunch of deep purple grapes. 
Read more