Unintended consequences of mental illness. Did I ever tell you guys

[EFerrari]

how Mom wound up out here in the hills?

My cousin had just had his onset of schizophrenia and was processing out from a couple of weeks at Stanford Hospital. (And to get this story, you have to know that my cousins are like my siblings. Our parents all parented all of us, we all fought and played and partied with each other, all 27 of us.) And Mom reads in the paper that wild horses are being offered up for adoption as an alternative to being put down by some agency in SoCal.

So, waiting for him to pack his stuff up, Mom tells my cousin, "Animals can be very healing. Maybe we could adopt one of these horses and you could take care of it."

"Auntie Rosie, if you want to buy a horse, buy it for you. Don't buy a horse for me because you want one because I don't want one."

Mom got so annoyed with him, she bought a rescue horse for herself just to show him she could buy a horse for herself. And she boarded it just up the hill from here for two years. Then, it got to be a hassle, driving the fifteen miles every day to tend to the horse and never having much time with it.

So, then she started looking for a place closer to the horse. A house, a condo, a space to put a mobile home, anything. And then one day we saw this place up for sale for the back taxes. It was a miserable junk heap, 20 abused acres 'way up in the foothills. The tenant had ostensibly had an auto repair business but everyone (but us) knew that he had cock fights here every weekend. It was either that or the sheriff just couldn't find him to serve him for twenty years. And the area where he had his "shop" was a toxic waste dump that took 20 years to cook.

After Mom bought the property, we found out that the tax people had been charging the previous owner the wrong, higher commercial rate for years. But, that's another story.

When Mom moved up here -- after the six months it took to evict the creepy cock fighting guy, which involved someone calling us to say he'd been sighted and then one of us rushing up here from our downtown office to serve him in the days before cell phones -- there was a falling down house with a bunch of wild chickens nesting in it, there was a mostly standing shed packed to the rafters with old car parts, old stereos and chicken feathers, the makings of cock pens and gallons and gallons of used motor oil. There were the remains of a small arena, complete with signs that advertised beer and snacks you could buy before the cock fights started.

There was one curly willow, one grave marked only with river stones and a very dirty stream.

There were no utilities. No gas, no electricity, no city water. There was one old silver AirStream with nothing working in it except some field mice. It turned out to be stolen twice over, lol.

Well, Mom sold her house in Sunnyvale and bought this place and she lived in that AirStream until she found a mobile home she could park here while she wrestled the country for permits to build a house. She was 62 when she started this project in 1995. That was 14 years ago.

There's still no house here. There is a nice arena and stabling for her two horses and there are six boarders pasturing here. Mom's still in the "contractor's trailer", the mobile home. She has an office here but it still looks like she's camping although there's a water association and a PG&E pole and a gas delivery every 3 months and a big ugly Comcast dish hidden out behind my studio. Oddly enough, she's decided to put an assisted living facility here and the county seems much more amenable to helping her with that than when she was just planning to put a few McMansions up here with the stables as a hook.

Unintended consequences. I need to remind my cousin that this is all his idea. :)

[david13]

1. What a story. Thanks for sharing. dc

[mopinko]

2. life takes you some strange places.

and they are so rarely where you thought you were going.

[mdmc]

3. thanks for the tale