November
2006
Cave Creek, Arizona1
It’s a welcoming place…one where you drink in the beauty, coupled with the sensation you’ve stepped back in time. This weekend, while driving our daughter home from the Scottsdale cancer treatment center and hospital, I had the occasion to reflect on Cave Creek. We came the back way, up Scottsdale Road and through Carefree and then down Cave Creek Road. While Carefree is beautiful, it doesn’t smack of the quaintness Cave Creek exudes. Nor, for me, does it make me smile when life weighs so heavy on my heart.
http://britblaise.com/blog/?p=23
Every Friday night, for several years, my mother and father, my husband and I went out to eat. We tried to dine at different place each Friday, and seldom ventured into Phoenix because dining out in Cave Creek was so much fun. Many of the places we frequented are gone now, along with my parents…but my memories remain. Bittersweet now as I reflect, but mostly just sweet while I’m driving through the quaint village they made their second home.
I live over the mountain, and not in Cave Creek proper. I’ve thought of moving there, but that was my father’s dream. While he stayed on a ranch there with friends in the winter, he didn’t buy a property. He couldn’t convince Mom to release the purse strings. Until he died in 2004, that spring, right before he died, she agreed. And they started to look in earnest. He died in April. That summer, while I helped Mom get her finances in order, I found she’d stashed an ungodly amount of money in a passbook savings, earning less than 1 percent. It was enough for Dad to buy his little chunk of heaven in Cave Creek. I take solace in the fact, I lived here in AZ, where he loved to come. If I hadn’t been here, he could never have dragged Mom out of Ohio, even for the winter!
