Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

The final mortgage payment was made early this month – thirty years and never missed or had a late payment. Yes, the light at the end of the financial tunnel, bright and so very, very restful. And it also meant that late this month I could purchase a couple of nice-to-have items, one of which I had been considering for quite a while – to whit, a Sodastream unit, to make carbonated beverages. I’ve never really liked soft drinks, but I do like plain carbonated water; no sweetener, no flavorings. The bottled kind tends to go flat almost as soon as the bottle is opened. Although the plain unflavored HEB house brand in aluminum cans is acceptable, the cans take up space on the shelf and in the recycle bin. A couple of years ago, we tried out a countertop unit that made carbonated beverages, (A freebie from Amazon Vine) and it was ok, but the CO2 cartridges were expensive and didn’t really last very long at all – so, back to the drawing board. I had heard good things about Sodastream, not the least of it being that they are made in Israel. So, I ordered a Sodastream package from Amazon which came with three one-liter bottles, two CO2 cartridges and two small bottles unsweetened cherry and lime flavors. A couple of days of use and I am pretty happy with it. The CO2 cartridge attached very easily, the bottle of cold water hooks up readily, and you can choose three degrees of bubblization. Now as soon as we go through the last three cases of HEB-brand bubbly water that my daughter bought because there was an offer to buy two, get the third one free – we’ll be Sodastreaming, exclusively.

The other semi-frivolous purchase was a bookshelf… you do know that we have a lot of books? Yeah, I was scrolling down through a friends’ FB page, and encountered a short video ad for a tall, six-level rotating bookshelf, which supposedly could hold 300+ books, while only taking up a small amount of floor space. Well, my attention was grabbed. The house is small, the existing bookshelves overflow as it is, what with the collections for research,  general history,  Texiana,  books for pleasure reading, those copies of books published by the Teeny Publishing Bidness, Wee Jamie’s overflowing collection … and one of the bookshelves so designated was an inexpensive folding number that I bought in Greece which has begun to fall apart. And that corner of the home office was in a horrendous state anyway … So, I found the exact same six-level rotating bookshelf on Amazon and ordered it. Putting it together was a bit tricky; it took the efforts of both of us and a stepstool. While it’s constructed of thick bamboo panels, there are reinforced panels and lots of flat-head screws connecting all shelves and the upright panels. I’ve loaded in all the levels, starting at the bottom and so far, it’s holding up well. The unit only occupies a small footprint, relatively speaking, rotates easily enough, and each of the six levels holds anywhere from 35-25 books. (More, in the case of very skinny volumes, less when it comes to brick-thick doorstoppers like J. Martin Hunter’s Trail-drivers of Texas.) Swapping out the old bookshelf for the tall rotating shelf meant reorganizing the existing shelves, rearranging stuff, throwing away things like owners’ manuals for appliances which had long since worn out and junked, or been given away … and turning up odd items, like some letters from my grandmothers posted to me in the early 1980s, an envelope of photo negatives processed at the AAFEs in Greece, and a Laura Ashley home goods catalog from 1986. No, I’m not a hoarder. I just loved the Laura Ashley English country cottage look. I kept that catalog as a memento and wish that I had also saved out some ‘80s Banana Republic catalogues. I loved the original,  high-quality Banana Republic items, and their catalogs were literate and fun to read…

I am already thinking about another rotating shelf…

This week, my daughter had to get a new veteran ID card, since she had her VA disability upgraded. Yes, service in the Marines for two strenuous hitches came at a physical price. She made an appointment at the Randolph AFB ID section to bring in all the supporting paperwork, and then we were reminded that my original issue blue retiree ID card wouldn’t be valid after the end of this month, never mind that it was supposed to be valid indefinitely. So she suggested that I come with her to the appointment and see if the issuing office couldn’t process both of ours at the same whack. This necessitated bringing Wee Jamie along, in the folding Cocomelon stroller that he is about two inches from out growing entirely.

Anyway, her appointment was early enough in the business day that there wasn’t much of a crowd, although I expect there will be a rush this week of retiree veterans like myself, replacing our old blue veteran ID.

To our relief, they were agreeable to doing both of our ID cards on the same appointment, even if I was a last-minute addition to the schedule. The tech processing our new cards was a female airman one-striper – competent and well-spoken, but seeming so very, very young. (Baby troops are so cute when they are little, and just barely housebroken…) Anyway, there was a bit of amusement when she initially read my daughter’s documents as having been a Marine at the rank of captain, and both my daughter and I burst out laughing. No, we were both NCOs and fiercely proud of it, although I expounded a bit on how sometimes certain people in certain skills have an invisible, much higher rank than their actual pay grade. The example I gave was that of a CID NCO, and of my own, when I was doing the regular radio news program at AFKN-Seoul.

I should have mentioned other specialties which have the invisible higher rank in the grand military scheme of things, and thus are sought out and respected by those in the know: the junior enlisted computer or mechanical expert who is gifted beyond all expectation, the clerk who can sort  out the most stubborn administrative tangle, that one NCO who knows everyone and plays the system like YoY o Ma plays the cello – they have an invisible rank and respect far beyond their actual stripes. My daughter added another piece of advice, which may have been more relevant to the Marine Corps, which run maybe 3% female, than to the Air Force, which stood at 13-15%. Her suggestion was to network extensively with other female NCOs, when our baby troop achieves that rank …and then we finished up getting the new ID cars, and left, with Wee Jamie still behaving very well.

But as we left, I thought of all the advice that we could have added; that a female NCO rightfully ought to keep her personal life a mystery to co-workers. That when suggesting some new process or way of doing things to a supervisor, one ought to volunteer to do the hard work on it yourself – because there will inevitably be work involved with a new process. That there are only about six different ways to do anything at all in the military, all of them about equally efficient, and usually it’s just a matter of habit and inertia that favors one above the other five …

Then I remembered that we were about old enough to have been mother and grandmother to the young one-striper, and realized that – well, there are some things that one has to figure out on ones’ own to really, really stick.

Be to her, Persephone,

All the things I might not be:

Take her head upon your knee.

She that was so proud and wild,

Flippant, arrogant and free,

She that had no need of me,

Is a little lonely child

Lost in Hell,—Persephone,

Take her head upon your knee:

Say to her, “My dear, my dear,

It is not so dreadful here.”

Prayer To Persephone – Edna St. Vincent Millay

One thing and another has led the garden at the back of the house to have become a total wreck. Between Snowmagedden 2021, some hard freezes over winters since – the back yard was not a refreshing sight. Two sapling fruit trees were killed outright, one was half dead branches, and the fourth may or may not leaf out at all in the next few weeks. This is exasperating, as the nectarine that we planted in front at about the time is thriving, grown to a nice size and produced a bumper crop of fruit last spring. The three grape vines that I also planted to grow up and cover the long arbor were also savaged by frost. I think that two are still alive, but I need to go out and trim the many dead branches.

The yard was also piled high with oak leaves from my next-door neighbor’s humongous oak tree – which is only a fair exchange, as my Arizona trash tree in the front has piled lavish quantities of dead leaves along the edge of their driveway. The various firebush plants, though, have naturalized and spread, and there is a volunteer Esperanza which has grown to a pretty good height. But all these native shrubs first went overgrown and sprawling, before the last cold snap killed off most of their leaves … so my back yard, which has on occasion looked like a veritable garden paradise; lush, flowering and green, now looks like something you’d see around the Addams family mansion – all dead stems and dried leaves. The raised beds are all empty of anything but compacted soil and more dead leaves. The last few years, a lot of my time and energy has been spent helping to take care of Wee Jamie. But this spring, I have reached a limit; I am tired of looking at the ruin.

This week, I’ve set aside some me-in-the-garden time, sweeping up and filling the recycle bin with oak leaves, trimming back the overgrown branches, and running them through the mulcher, to make some mulch chips to put on the raised beds and on the space that I planted some sun-loving daylilies and delphiniums that came in an assortment from Costco. I also splurged and bought a young mandarin orange in a 5-gallon pot from the same place, at half the price that it would have been from one of the plant nurseries. I wanted to buy one last year, but Costco’s small trees and shrubs are seasonal, and once they appear, they aren’t there for long.

I’d like to plan on reviving many of the hanging plants in baskets, as well. The hot weather last summer killed all of the Boston ferns, and a couple of years ago, all my spider plants had their roots eaten by thirsty squirrels. The hardscape, the pavers and the stone bed borders are all in good shape, but the chicken coop needs a new roof over the run area before we start with chickens again.

Mid-March is the last time that we can expect a winter frost in these parts – I’m also hoping that this summer is not going to be one of those hideously hot and dry ones. I also have all the tubes and drip emitters to revitalize the drip system in back – and that ought to take care of keeping what I have planted this weekend in good shape. Fingers crossed. I want a pretty garden again!

Well, actually two milestones; both just around the corner. One would be the final mortgage payment on Chez Hayes – the little suburban cottage patch of paradise that I bought two years before I retired from the Air Force in 1997. Thirty-year mortgage at an 8-point something rate of interest, but no down payment, because of being under the grace and favor of the VA. Yes, that rate seems high – but as my daughter the real estate agent tells me – historically pretty much the average. I never refinanced, as it seemed to be just too much trouble collecting up the documentation and paying for an appraisal and never took out any equity loans because that never really appealed to me as an option. In a relatively rare moment of economic sanity, I opted on a price for the house and sliver of garden, which gave me a mortgage payment that amounted to one-quarter of my monthly income at the time. This was about the same amount that I had usually paid in rent … so I was pre-programmed for that regular expense. There were times, post-retirement where the wolf lurked at the bottom of the driveway – but I was always able to scrape through.

The assessed value is now a little more than double the original price it went for in 1995. I have since been able to renovate the original back deck into a covered screened porch, renovated both bathrooms, replace the original contractor grade windows, siding, garage door, and the roof – that last, twice over, which is about par for this part of Texas. There are a couple more things I want to do, when there is a bit more money in hand after the mortgage is done: mainly, revamp the kitchen and install nice vinyl flooring in the rest of the house. This waits on my daughter buying her own place for herself and Jamie.

The other milestone is the legal settlement for the auto accident in July, which totaled Thing the Versa has been finalized. A nice check will be coming my way in another week or so. I was comprehensively bruised and badly shaken, besides sustaining some injuries which only became apparent afterwards. A good friend of ours, who is also Wee Jamie’s godfather, insisted that we should get an injury lawyer – a firm which he could personally recommend. So we did; it was a piece of good fortune for me, I suppose, that the other driver was not only clearly at fault (he bombed out of a parking lot and T-boned the Versa, passing by in the inside lane) but was also insured. This isn’t always the case, lately.

The payment won’t be enough for another car, as the injury lawyer assured me – but it will pay down a couple of outstanding accounts, mostly to do with the windows and the siding, and allow us to stay in hotels when we do book events a good bit from home. So, we are very happy with how 2025 is turning out for us, personally.