Photographs Of Places I've Lived # 20: Diaz Ave.

(Image from Google Maps.)

In August of 2016, we escaped Kentucky.  The wife drove a big truck with some of our stuff in it (our unsold house in Kentucky held many of our belongings) & I drove our tiny Prius.  We had four cats & four dogs, which in retrospect seems completely improbable.  I have memories of getting to Fort Worth, Texas, on a Friday afternoon, on I-30, with the August sun bearing down, trapped on a highway I would get to know too well, overwhelmed, frustrated, strangely excited.

We landed at this rental which we agreed to sight unseen, because of the aforementioned animals.  It was not a terribly clean place, & when winter hit we discovered it was not a terribly insulated place.  The day we moved in, early August, was hotter than most people's ideas of hot, & I had to take the dogs to a room where there was an overworked wall unit, as moving people moved our things inside, leaving the front door open nearly all the time.  When there was a moment to breathe, my wife tasked me to go get some food for us to eat, but also some things (for no real reason there wasn't a shower curtain) at a retail store.  I went.  I visited a grocery store, a box store, a cool vegan restaurant - all in the peculiar dry heat of a Texas summer night - & when I got home, I found my wife weeping.  She hated the place we'd ended up, she was second-guessing her job choices, she was - in a word - miserable.

& really avoiding miserable would be the goal of our time back in Dallas/Fort Worth.  We were there for about three years & mostly it wasn't what we wanted or expected.  The first morning in our new place, we woke early - Texas summers being what they were - & walked around the new neighborhood, to get our bearings.  At 6:30 in the morning, it was 83 degrees.  We needed to make adjustments.

Though it's barely been five years, I can't remember when my wife decided to look for a new house, but I don't think we lived in Diaz Avenue for more than a few months.  As someone who understands time in terms of mowing lawns, I don't think I mowed that lawn more than a dozen times, probably less.  I was in that house the night America stupidly chose a cartoon clown to be president.  My records of photographs show that by mid-November, we had purchased a different place to live.  As usual, my wife's tastes were second-guessed by me, & I was found to be dumbly lacking in imagination.