Life Among The Cactus
By Sharon Haney
Are you crazy enough to buy a house
outside a small desert town after a brief stop
at one of its local lunch spots? Maybe you
would want to invest in a nice leisurely
dinner to be certain that you are keen on the
area and its food. Even the original cowboy
settlers confirmed that the land had water
and cattle fodder before settling in. Such a
spur of the moment decision—would you do
such a thing?
We did.
Thinking we were an anomaly, my
husband and I were astonished to hear of
other adventurous couples who, like
ourselves, traveled to the Big Bend region
then returned home only to pull up roots and
move there. For what?
Climate. Scenery. Serenity. The nightlife?
The cactus?
The road trip that brought us out west was
partially due to feelings of guilt over never
taking our children to the Big Bend National
Park. Now that we were empty nesters living
forty-five minutes west of Houston in an
expanding town called Fulshear, we thought
it would be a splendid idea to see what West
Texas was really all about. So, in May of
2015 we rented a little adobe house in
Marathon for a week. One of those days we
made a trip to Alpine for brunch at Judy’s
Bread and Breakfast, as we wanted to
investigate this western town with a name
that was definitely Sound of Music—worthy
and oozed the promise of surrounding
mountains. Being a licensed real estate
broker at the time, I perused the local real
estate pamphlets wherever we traveled, and
this time was no different—well, it was a
20
Cenizo
Winter 2020
It was the most impulsive
purchase we’ve made in our
thirty-six years of marriage.
Wildly freeing.
little different because we actually went to
see one of the homes. This particular house
looked like our style: a low slung, brick ranch
on acreage close to town with vista views and
in dire need of tender loving care (to be
honest, it needed oodles of tender loving
care).
We bought it.
It was the most impulsive purchase we’ve
made in our thirty-six years of marriage.
Wildly freeing. Though it meant two years of
nine-hour drives from Houston to Alpine for
remodeling work on weekends and vacations,
we have never regretted our decision. Once
the interior was close to completion, our
many working trips out to West Texas
involved me driving a car and my husband
driving a U-Haul truck with various
furniture, boxes, bags, fishing kayaks,
stained glass lamps, quilts and our precious
rugs inside. I lost count of the number of U-
Haul trips we made, but it was enough to
make our neighbors, who work for the border
patrol, suspicious. We were like a well-oiled
machine—backing the U-Haul up to our
garage door in the evening and then
efficiently removing it by mid-morning. We
eventually made enough trips to relocate our
entire household without hiring
professionals. It wasn’t easy, but it was a
good exercise in time and money
management.
In the beginning, having no family or
friends in the area to rely on meant that we
didn’t know who to call—and more
importantly who NOT to call—for household
projects. Since we moved in before the
remodeling was completed and after a few
subsequent years of investing our own labor,
we have become DIY pros. One of the biggest
projects beyond the painting, rewiring the
disastrous electrical job done on the house
during the remodel, installing all the
baseboards, window trim, oven, range and