A Feel for the Neighborhood

We live in a fairly new neighborhood, literally on the very outskirts of town. This is the view from Abraham's window. You can see the entrance to the subdivision and the little park where Hyrum catches the bus on the left. There's not much out here. The closest proper shopping is about 15 minutes away. While there's still some room for more development, there's the Petroglyph National Monument (a national park) just down the road (the darker bit of hill you can see) and beyond that there's an Indian reservation. I think the desert and big open sky have their own magnificent beauty, so while part of me would love a closer grocery store, I rather like living on the edge of civilization.

We're up on the West side hills and have a really lovely view of the city, especially at night. This is the big park down the road in the opposite direction as the picture above. Stormcloud dead ends at this park, and beyond it is an arroyo (big dry creek bed that acts as drainage during monsoon season). I was afraid that after living in West Lafayette, surrounded by random corn fields and wooded groves, I would feel very far away from nature in a city as big as Albuquerque. While there are very few trees, and definitely no corn fields, I still feel close to the land and the raw beauty of this place is captivating.

A little closer to home, here is our back yard. We thought the boys would love having all this dirt to dig and play in, so we were okay with an un-landscaped yard. Turns out it hasn't been as great as we anticipated. There are lots of pokey weed things that hurt your feet for days after you step on them, and without anything else back there, there just isn't much of a draw. We've started looking into what it will cost to landscape and it's a lot pricier than we thought. Still, it is near the top of our list of things to do once our Bainbridge house sells.

It's interesting to me that we've ended up here. This house is everything we didn't want when we started looking. It's bigger and more expensive than we wanted, and far away from Matthew's work. It's one of those huge "modern" houses built at the height of the housing bubble, not really the style we dreamed of, and it seems to hold something of a '"rich person" stigma. We didn't want to be presumptuous and get the big fancy house that we'd be in forever right out of grad school. We wanted a smaller home, close to Sandia, that maybe needed some work, and we'd live there while saving up to build our dream house in the foothills. This house was NOT on my radar. But, Matthew looked at it on line, then drove past it with his dad, then finally brought me by. When we walked in with the realtor, it took about 30 seconds for us to both feel strongly that this was it. I hadn't even looked around the place before I knew it was where Heavenly Father wanted us. There are 4 toilets and 7 bathroom sinks to clean every week, and it takes a good hour to wash the tile floors downstairs. The master bedroom is way bigger than we know what to do with, the property taxes are atrocious, and eventually there will be lots of yard work to keep up with. It's not my dream, but I feel so at peace that Heavenly Father told us what to do and we were obedient. To be sure, I am not ungrateful. This house is more than I could have ever hoped for at this stage in our lives, and it has so many really great features. I know we will be happy here, and that was and continues to be my ultimate dream home.