After my father moved to El Paso when I was nine, my mother and I moved into a much smaller house on the south side of San Antonio, in an area of the city called Lavaca, a neighborhood that was home to a lot of the city’s artists and musicians and that was known for its proximity to various art galleries and distilleries, to privately owned coffee shops and restaurants.
The street that we lived on was called South Presa, and at that time most of the houses on our street were older one-story structures built in the thirties or forties, many of them with fenced-in front yards, overgrown with honeysuckle or bristlegrass or trumpet vines, some of them abandoned or boarded up, others looking like they might be torn down by the city any day. The house we lived in, though, wasn’t like most of the others on our street. It was a Spanish adobe-style house, with a small courtyard in the front, surrounded by white stucco walls and filled with agave and prickly pear cacti and various succulents that the previous owners had left in planters around the courtyard and which my mother tended to daily with the seriousness of a professional gardener. There was also a small outdoor fountain in the middle of the courtyard, which sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t but which my mother felt gave our front lot an elegant look, especially when she lit it at night and hung white lights in the trees around the edges of the courtyard.
It was a source of pride for her, I think—that courtyard, and that house—even though the house was small and old and had a constant stream of problems: electrical issues, busted wall pipes, small cracks in the walls and foundation. I sometimes found myself wishing that she’d just rented a small modern apartment on the Northside, in the same neighborhood we’d lived in when my father was still with us, but my mother really wanted to buy her own place—to own actual property in the city—and even if this house was the best she could afford, it was still better than renting, she felt.
“We’re appreciating,” she’d say to me over dinner, as we sat at the small Formica table in our kitchen. “Day by day we’re getting richer. Even if you can’t feel it, it’s happening. I’m telling you, one day this neighborhood is going to be expensive, and we’ll cash in and move up to Olmos Park or somewhere.”
