Our Current Taos Housing (?) Situation [Revised]

Well, it’s like this…

My wife currently rents a studio in a beautiful place and loves practicing there. For the longest time, she didn’t have a suitable piano studio and now she does, so this pretty much anchors our housing discussion. We don’t need a great big house, in other words, because she already has a place for her piano. The very funky old adobe where we live is several miles away, but she’s already more or less used to the driving. Finding a new home to rent within walking distance would be a coup, obviously.

The image above is taken from the “yard,” our sagebrush-covered hillside, and shows the window I’m looking out of right now as I’m typing. The view could be a helluva lot worse! And in truth, aside from funkiness on a level that would shock the shiny faucets crowd — I’m not sure my sister-in-law ever recovered — this is a very fine place to live. For a bachelor, that is. It’s always been crowded for the two of us, but the main reason we’ve been looking for new housing since forever is because the funkiness is wearing my honey down, which makes me feel pretty damn bad. After all, I’m the one who persuaded her to quit her job and follow me into instant poverty in the Terrible High Desert, and the love of my life deserves better than that. She came with a smile and she’s smiling now, but there was a lot of pain in the middle, and some of it is probably just tucked away.

For whatever reasons, then — though I think I’m looking at them — we just haven’t ever found anything affordable that’s better than where we are. The vast majority of Taos rentals are frankly awful: too funky, too expensive, too small, etc. etc. And I’m afraid that in my mind’s eye, I’m always comparing them to the rambling country property we threw away in Maryland by selling just before the Great Real Estate Bubble inflated. (We recovered our equity but made almost nothing on the sale after owning the property for over 10 years!) The old home was constantly falling down around us, and I hated making repairs, but it was surrounded by 2.57 acres of green grass and trees that I still miss, even after all this time. Remembering the gardens my wife left behind and how much they meant to her drives a stake through my heart. I was proud to be a “landowner” and cried when we sold it. There are issues, you might say, probably the biggest reason why we haven’t landed one of those insider deals that canny locals seem to find after they’ve paid their dues. And brother, have we paid ours.

Sometimes it seems as if the years of reading the ads, calling landlords on the phone, and beating my head against the wall are pulling me under. The insider deal never materializes. The rental market is flooded with properties being rented until the real estate market goes back up [snort], so it’s even harder to know what to do — I see a place advertised, but figure we’d just have to move again after a while.

[whine, snivel...]

But for me in particular, the current financial crisis (read: bankers’ coup d’etat) is just about the final straw. Yesterday I told my wife that if it weren’t for that, I’d really rather buy a place somewhere, so nobody could boot us out. If a couple of old ladies die before the Dow evaporates, I might inherit a down payment, so buying is a possibility or would be if I trusted anyone in Washington. That sounds like a cliché, I know, but this is different, much darker and more dangerous. Such a wasted opportunity, this government. It’s the tragedy of my golden years. [snort, guffaw] I’m so angry at the banks now, how we’ve all been fooled,and the willful destruction of the middle class, I want to stop feeding the beast. Right now, at least, that makes me not want to rent another place or move at all! I told her all that too, and she agreed with me. Wow.

(Better watch out: my sweetie’s from Iowa, and if you lose her…)

Can’t buy, won’t rent, don’t want to spend one more red cent, not even on that new iMac I have my eyes on. Everyone is too insane, local realtors and landlords are still drinking the “It’s different in Taos” kool-aid, and I haven’t seen an affordable place here yet that beats the smelly old farmhouse we gave up 10 years ago in Maryland. That’s just a fact. We had so much more personal space, for one thing. Birds, trees, water, and soil you can grow things in count for more than I realized, too. Jesus Christ, I even had apple trees and timber. So here I sit, recognizing the impediments imposed by my attitude and trying to be open. I look on the Internet at homes for sale in Iowa and Nebraska, grasping at straws — “Yeah, sure, we could do that,” and for a pittance compared to the overpriced dreck in these parts — but it’s taken 10 long years to feel halfway at home in Taos County, there’s an undeniable mystical power here that drives me good-crazy, and I’m not about to uproot us once again at our age without a damned solid underpinning. Besides, my wife would shoot me freaking dead.

The current plan, if I can call it that, is to keep on doing what we’re doing, my wife keeping her studio, with the two of us right here in funky Llano Quemado, until something opens up in Taos or my professional life. Basically, we read through the classifieds every week, say, “Screw that!” and so it goes. Another week, another month, another season on a bad dirt road in bachelor heaven, waiting for Godot…

I think my task’s an inner one, though, don’t you?

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