Something extraordinary happened today as we were leaving Scottsdale: my mother-in-law laughed. I know she’s German, and Germans don’t laugh, but this wasn’t even an ordinary bit of laughter. I have heard her kind of demure chuckle before, but this was Jutta simply losing it, HARD. What triggered it was me asking her to “shake a leg” as we were approaching the car. She paused a second with the back door open and physically looked at her leg and shook it a bit as she translated what I was trying to tell her from English to German. Deciphering it and picturing it, Jutta broke into the most uproarious gut-busting laughter Caroline and I have ever seen from her. Once in the car, she was still rolling in laughter as she thought about the idea of shaking a leg. The three of us laughed so hard that we all had tears in our eyes.

On our last road trip here during Jutta’s visit, we are going to the Four Corners area where Arizona, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico meet. Our first stop is in St. Johns, Arizona, where Caroline and I bought 40 acres of land (an embarrassing Y2k thing); at the moment, we are still making payments, but we don’t know how much longer we’ll entertain the idea that someday we could live out here. It’s not that it isn’t beautiful, but there are aspects of living in a community like this in the remote corners of Arizona that may not be very appealing to the non-gun-toting liberal person of deep curiosity. While we could accommodate our neighbors, it’s seriously unlikely they would accommodate us.

The high desert has many appeals, and the quiet, serenity, and solitude lead the list, but we cannot only be friends with plants.

The views from our property are perfect for us, and we would love waking every day to look out a window gazing upon this landscape. From needing to drill a well, build out a septic system, have electricity pulled from the road out here a couple of miles, and then build a home too, this starts to feel like an impossible dream. If only we were millionaires.

Having not left Scottsdale until midday, it was getting late by the time we made it to Grants, New Mexico. For our effort and the late start, we were rewarded with an amazing sunset.