The neighborhoods of old city Mesa are crowded with small houses and low-income apartments. Desert ranch style homes are rectangular with sprawling patios, flat roofs and sometimes a stucco arch entrance to the patio for charm. Mom and Pop tire shops, tamale stores, dry cleaners and Mexican food marts stand nearby and the family Wal-Mart is stocked with all your canned essentials and tamale making needs. Buildings with red neon signs don’t need to make a statement and line wide parking lot plazas. Retirement trailer park communities are stuffed haphazardly in between everything. Trees, grass and parks are sparse and power lines droop above the ground. Roads are two lanes and someone always seems to be driving in your personal bubble. Sidewalks are crowded with bustling people, walking, biking, waiting for bus stops or spinning giant arrow signs that you most often glimpse from the corner of your eye. A lonely grocery cart can usually be spotted sitting by its lonesome at the side of the road. 

My husband used to drive the neighborhoods around our first home here, reliving his pizza days before the time of female directed navigation and driving our toddler son around. 

At the time we owned a restaurant and spent most of our days on autopilot. We forced our sleep deprived bodies to go about daily motions just to keep ourselves awake. Also, trying to nap a two-year-old while sleep deprived was torture at its finest and nothing but the steady murmur of the engine and a song could make him fall asleep. 

One day I came home to a wide eyed, animated husband standing in the kitchen. He wasted no time in greeting me.

“Krystal, I have the craziest story!” His excitement was certainly a rarity in these times. His face looked alive and the bags under his eyes unnoticed by wide smile across his face. I nodded my head in acknowledgment, my level of energy well below his. I longed for the days before Motherhood and Restaurant duties when you could sleep at free will. 

He told me about a new neighborhood he had discovered. He needed to fill up with gas at the gas station just up the street and decided to venture around behind the Wal-Mart. To anyone observing the area it looked like the road ended and went nowhere. But there, sandwiched between the crowded streets of old Mesa and the five-lane freeway to the north was the historical district of Lehi where farmhouses and acre plots spanned.  

“I’ve been driving around the neighborhood a lot now and I always see this one house for sale. Well today I got out of the car to go check it out.” It felt like he might burst from being unable to tell his story fast enough. “And as we were walking around the back of the house, I turned the corner and I saw a white picnic table. My mind felt like it was suddenly in a dream-like state where I instantaneously fast forwarded to a future moment in time when our family was sitting at the table and I heard the words, “Well, here we are.” Then in a blink, I was returned to the present with that image burned into my mind.” I starred at my husband with goosebumps running slowly down my arms. I have never had such a feeling like he was describing but truthfully this man was one of the most honest Men I knew. As he described this feeling to me I pictured an iPhone photo with the live setting turned on. A photo where you could see a snippet of surroundings and you could almost see what was said and what was felt. The moment and the memory seemed to blur the lines between inception and a premonition.

Overnight we went from being the couple who bought our first home and said it would be our forever home to taking frequent trips through this little neighborhood and pretending we lived there.

 I was in awe of how it had been here the whole time and felt like we had stumbled upon a precious secret. It reminded us of driving the backstreets of our country childhoods. Giant trees loomed high above the roadways. The neighborhood had a small-town charm, with homes built by the original Mormon settlers themselves. There was an old white church and white fenced pastures. We started taking our son through the neighborhoods for bike rides or walks. We found a family who made fresh breads and cinnamon rolls out of their home and made weekly trips to buy it. We could always find ducks floating the canals in front of the houses and diving below to catch a meal. 

The premonition house sat on a large lot with several acres. It was had an in-ground basement and a small porch and I found myself dreaming up a little porch swing to sip morning coffee in. 

Large trees swayed their canopies in the wind and one of them in the front yard had the perfect sturdy branch for a tire swing. Grass and weeds were growing ramped and desert dust blanketed everything. The roof looked strangely unsettling and the paint was dated, although I did enjoy that it was not the defining stucco and brown of every other desert home. There were several buildings on the property and one seemed to be an old workshop with a carport. In the carport was a wall of cubed shelves. You could see right through it to an open pasture and every shelf was lined with old, rusty tools and spare parts covered in time. Another building was an old barn with a water cistern on one corner and off the back a room of trees intentionally grown to be a giant tangled canopy and what we could only assume was a bird aviary. Between the house and old barn was a brick courtyard with a custom children’s playhouse build of wood and stucco. Here is where the white picnic table stood, flakes of paint slowly falling to the ground and abandoned. I could already see stringing lights above it and serving homemade dinners freshly picked from the gardens to our family. 

We truly believed that house was meant for us. We tried everything we could to think up ways to afford going to auction to buy it. Realistically we knew it was well beyond our reach. We had no money to give, no resources and even if by some miracle we could afford it, no money or time to contribute to the considerable amount of work it needed. When the house was finally sold we watched as it was put back together and fixed up and our hearts felt like heavy weights. What did the dream mean if it wasn’t this? 

Sometimes it doesn’t take a big accomplishment or a traumatic event to change your life. All you have to do is be called to a single moment. One small, simple moment can change your life forever. 

I never wanted anything different from what I already had until we suddenly found ourselves standing in the courtyard next to that white picnic table. There a little voice whispering to my soul about a life I never knew I wanted. A life where our kids could run in wide-open spaces. Where food was grown by our hands, tended with love and so fresh it came from steps away and had been picked just hours before. Where our story was more than a small family living in a patio home and sinking into a life of exhaustion.