MCMVIII - MMVIII

My favorite old girl is celebrating one hundred years of life.

A ball was dropped on New Year’s Eve in Times Square for the first time to herald her coming. She arrived on the planet the same year as Simone de Beauvier, Rex Harrison, and Oskar Schindler; and she has outlived them all. The Grand Canyon was established as a “National Monument” the year she was born, (although Arizona itself was still a territory and would not be a state until 1912,) and Henry Ford produced his first Model T. Like this year, 1908 was a Leap Year, an Olympic year, (London Games) and an election year. Teddy Roosevelt was President when 1908 began, and William Howard Taft was president-elect when it ended. Butch Cassidy and Sundance were gunned down in Bolivia three days after that election.

A lot of things happen in a year. And a century.

Although she is turning a hundred, you won’t hear her name announced on the Today Show, or read any write-ups in the paper; because the exact date she came into being is sadly undocumented.

We will host a birthday party for her here in December because by then we will know she has had her birthday- but because we aren’t sure of the date, I thought she deserved some mention at this mid-point of the year.

The place that I call home is crossing into her second century.

She was built by a pair of schoolteachers, the Fergusons, who came from the Midwest to teach at the mining camps north of town, and later bought by one of Yuma’s founders, E.F. Sanguinetti, whose own (smaller) home is a local museum, and who rented her to the chief clerk at his store. Later, she was home to a Southern Pacific railroad engineer, was a boarding house during the depression, a piano and organ store in the fifties and sixties, and who knows what all else. She has survived earthquakes and major flooding on the Colorado, (six blocks away) she has stood calm- and as coolly as possible- through a hundred years of desert heat.

I am passionate about this old girl.

I don’t hear a train whistle in the night and not think about what that meant to another woman in this house who was waiting for her man’s return. I feel the flutter of relief in my own bosom that I know she must have felt. I don’t walk up the front steps, or touch a doorframe or a window, or stare through wavy panes as I wash my dishes, but know somewhere in the back of my mind that it’s all been done before. I don’t cross over the threshold from the outside world without feeling the burdens of the day leave me, and the welcome home of generations of people; strong, desert people; people whose names I will never know- but whose spirits I understand in ways beyond knowing- embrace me as I close the door. I am another link in chain of the living in this place, the loving in this place, the finding shelter in this place, that will continue far into the future.

And in return, I give her my devotion.

To me, this old house represents all the things I value most. It embodies the qualities I seek for myself, for my children, for my students, for the world. To me, a hundred years of eighteen-inch-thick, white-painted, concrete diamond-blocks stands for-- Integrity. Tenacity. Fortitude. Patience. It combines a respect for heritage with the ability to look beyond today to the future and know the foundation is strong enough to weather whatever may come.

And it feels just like home.

I am proud to be a link.

Happy Birthday, old girl.

And many, many more.