Exactly 10 years ago, today – July 18, 2005 – my husband and I left Atlanta, Georgia and embarked for our new home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. We had spent the previous night with friends in Brookhaven, in the house where we had gotten married in 1992.  We were in separate cars and had CB radios to communicate with. We were going to 10-4 our way across the country.  For those of you who are too young to know what the hell I’m talking about, “10-4” is a code used by CB radio owners to indicate that a message had been received.  Clearly, we didn’t expect our cell phones to work in the Texas Panhandle.

I spent the first several hours in tears as I left a place I had truly come to love over the 26 years I had lived there. There was no turning back now – our house in Peachtree Corners was empty except for a stone I had placed on the hearth, like the stone one leaves on a Jewish grave to help the dead “stay put.”  That, and a pile of furniture in the basement that ended up going to Hurricane Katrina survivors shortly after we left. 

Why were we leaving Atlanta, where I had a home and a business and lots of beloved friends and a network of esteemed associates?  Well, I’ll tell you. When I first met my husband in Los Angeles in 1987, we made a few agreements.  He agreed to move to Atlanta, albeit kicking and screaming, if I agreed to move to Santa Fe with him some day.  Grant had lived in Santa Fe in the middle 1980s before we met and he had gone broke there.  That’s how he ended up in L.A.  I told him I would agree to move to Santa Fe with him some day if he agreed to not go broke there twice. 

It’s an easy place to go broke, but he loved it there.  For Grant, God lived in Santa Fe.

Then in 1993, Grant had an heart incident on a business trip in Detroit.  A plaque had ruptured in his right coronary artery.  It occurred to me that life was short and all my husband ever wanted was to live in Santa Fe.  When he returned following angioplasty, I told him I wanted him to have “a piece of the rock.”  I  didn’t want him to die without realizing his dream of living in the desert, with skies unobscured by trees.

So, we went off to find a piece of property.  I thought that just having the land would satisfy him and that we would continue to live in Atlanta, where I was very happy amid the trees and rolling hills and flowing river that I still return to regularly.

The property we bought was 5.17 acres on Grant’s old hiking grounds – a beautiful moon-like landscape where the stars nestled close to your face at night. It was 10 minutes from the Plaza but wild enough to keep us from bringing our 21-year-old cat, who was accustomed to being in the great outdoors.  No domestic pet would ever be able to run free in the place where we bought land.  I kept wishing our cat would live to be 100 – in human years – but he only made it to 105 in cat years.  And then, I had to accept that maybe my husband wouldn’t make it that long and he had to have that horizon to walk out into in the drylands.

The plan was to build a house at long distance in a town that functioned like a third-world country.  I was nervous about it.

I considered suicide by throwing myself into the Chattahoochee River and having permanent residence there.  It was with that level of enthusiasm that I left a place that felt more like home to me than any other place I had ever lived before.  And that included New England, where I thought my soul would surely go after I had left this mortal coil. 

In the end, I was the one to expedite our move to Santa Fe.  There are water rights issues in the desert and we had to get a well in the ground very quickly.  Grant had a friend in Santa Fe who was a geologist.  He charged us $36,000 to install a well 903 feet into the earth.  And that was without the pump housing.

When Grant came out to check on his friend’s progress, he noticed that a house was going up on the the property next door.  It looked like the kind of house we would design.  So, I came out and had a look.  It was going to be a great house – up on a ridge, with spectacular views – far nicer than the views we would’ve had on the property we had originally purchased. So, I told Grant, “Let’s tell the builder that we can buy this house as long as he buys back the property he sold us four years ago.”  And, before I knew it, I was moving to Santa Fe many years earlier than I expected to – because my 21-year-old cat had died and my husband was alive and well and enthusiastic about realizing his dream.

We had a good trip across the country, moments before all the hurricanes began to churn.  Our first stop was in Little Rock, Arkansas.  The second was in Amarillo, Texas. The sky was a perfect cloudless blue throughout our separate but equal journeys.  And the traffic was light.  We took our valuables into motel rooms at night.  And everything was fine until we got to town and discovered that the P.O. box that Grant had made a special trip to secure had not been assigned because it was the mail carrier’s day off.  And we discovered that our high-priced housing inspector had taken our money but had not inspected our house.  And so forth.

But it’s been 10 years.  We moved into our house in Santa Fe on July 21, 2005.  We had excellent movers.  They only broke one lamp – and it was a lamp we didn’t care about.  We have many friends here that we love.  We have an interesting and diverse lifestyle.  And, exactly one year ago, we adopted a new cat.  A cat that will never step a toenail outside.

The night we moved in, we had dinner at a local hangout called Harry’s Roadhouse.  We became friends with a couple at the next table over.  A few nights ago, we had a farewell dinner with them there.  They are moving to Delaware to be near family.

And we’re staying in Santa Fe.  We haven’t gone broke yet. 

But we’re working on it.