A Fun Farewell Party

My friend Sandy is moving from Albuquerque to Ohio for her new job. She is the friend who helped us take care of our dogs while I was having chemotherapy. I’ll always be grateful for that. (My mother-in-law, Monica, cared for the dogs while we were in Boston getting my surgery, then Sandy helped us with them extensively during chemo, and now Serenity has them.)

Sandy bought a beautiful new house in Ohio with a backyard that is surrounded by woods and looks like a park. Wow!

She’s already been doing her new job for a few months now from Albuquerque, and is very happy with the job. She says her new coworkers are super nice. It’s great that she doesn’t have to deal with the stress of the first few weeks on a new job at the exact same time as the move.

Another friend of ours, Sara, hosted a going-away party for Sandy, and John and I decided to delay our departure from Albuquerque in order to attend the party.

It turns out we ended up with a broken down van that John had to fix, so we would have been delayed either way! We had the second of our two exhaust manifolds break in half. The first one broke last year. Seems to be a thing with that van! At least we made it to Albuquerque this time, and didn’t end up stuck along the side of the road trying to wire it back together with found fencing scraps like last year! This year it was cracked almost through, hanging on by a tiny bit of metal – we could hear it get worse and worse during the final several hours of the trip. Ugh!

Sara and Tom also have a park-like backyard (which seems to be an unintended theme for today’s post). In Sandy’s case, that’s not too hard to find greenery in suburban Ohio. But how in the world does Sara have a yard that looks like this – right here in Albuquerque?

Sara’s on a ditch! Some of the older homes near the river in Albuquerque have historic irrigation rights from community acequias (also just called ditches) that were constructed a very long time ago to carry and distribute irrigation water. The acequias are managed locally by collectives, and everyone gets water on certain days for certain lengths of time. Each property has a flood gate that opens to allow the water to flow onto their property when it’s their turn.

Sara and Tom bought the house 40 years ago and planted fruit trees along the back edge of the property where the ditch water runs. She has apples, figs, nectarines, peaches, apricots, cherries, plums, blackberries, and grapes! It’s an amazing oasis in the desert. I wonder if they’d be interested in having a roommate or two? I could weed or something! Pick fruit? Mow? Lol!

That picture makes it look like no one came to the party, but at that moment everyone was just clustered around the food inside or sitting on the expansive deck along the back side of the house.

Seeing so many of my friends again in-person was also an amazing experience. My friends all believe in getting the vaccination, so I’m pretty sure every single one of them at the party was vaccinated. Plus we mostly stayed outside. Even so, it was a bit weird when we were crowded around the table, leaning with our heads together over the food, serving ourselves from all the excellent potluck offerings. I think it’s going to be awhile before we’re comfortable with close situations that we used to take for granted.

Here’s John, checking out how many of Sara’s plants he could identify as edible.