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The big kids would listen to Kiss and Led Zeppelin, or maybe the Eagles and The Guess Who if they weren't headbangers -- I could hear the music at night in the summertime, when they drove by in their vans or dads' cars with the windows rolled down: Beth; I Wanna Rock All Night; Shout It Out Loud.

My bedtime was 8pm, but they were just getting started and I'd lie in bed and listen to their laughing girlfriends and tagalong buddies drunk on beer. Sometimes I'd hear a motorcycle accelerating way out Highland Road with a lonely whine and I'd know for sure it was my favourite time, summertime. And it was the last time I ever really felt a sense of place, of home.

I moved to San Francisco in 1992. It was one of those things you could only do when you're still a kid -- I didn't really know anyone, I had no job lined up, not a lot of money...but off I went, and stayed for 11 years.

I have ambition; I'm creative, apparently "quirky," reasonably technologically inclined (or at least partial to boys who are), and hardworking -- I should have been the perfect Bay Area / Silicon Valley drone. The Mission, Nob Hill, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto -- no matter where I lived, I never fit in. I always felt like an observer. But I could fake it -- and for awhile I faked it well. For awhile.

Among other things, I suppose it was knowing that if I couldn't belong where I should have -- in Silicon Valley -- then I'd have no trouble living where I should not -- in Avra Valley. So, bought this crazy place, The House of Squalor and Rancheria Palomita, out in unincorporated Pima County, Arizona and left California behind. I live in a valley of creosote that reminds me of my first desert love, the Mojave. Big skies, and rugged mountains with names like Pan Quemado and Ragged Top. It's a fifteen minute drive from the freeway, sharing the road with cotton farming equipment and shiny duelie pickup trucks and limping old rusted things that fart great greasy clouds of smoke.

I drive up West Sandy in my little blue sporty car -- sunglasses and beret, windows down, Josh Rouse on permanent rotation -- and the barefoot girls at the bottom of the street giggle and wave. Word has gotten around about that girl from California who bought the Yarter place, but they leave me alone. I'm a lapsed yuppie in NASCAR land.

My home is one of the few real (as opposed to manufactured, or mobile) houses on the street -- a 1953 company house from the nearby Silverbell copper mine. The pavement ends just up aways and motorbikes and dune buggies zip up and down the street all day and into the night -- the lonely whine. There are not-to-code shacks and cute-as-a-button manufactured homes with pink trim and garden gnomes. Grizzled, paranoid veterans in old trailers and strung out speed freaks and well-to-do cattlemen and families living their American dream with their freckled kids in pressed jeans and cowboy boots riding bikes and playing catch. And me.

My house was moved to the property about 20 years ago...plunked down in the middle of a dense three-acre parcel a hundred or more feet away from the street, shaded by a massive mesquite that scrapes the tin porch roof in the breeze. It's tiny by suburban standards -- 800 square feet -- but there's a fabulous screened porch on the side that doubles the living space.

The weekend after Thanksgiving was a delight: the temperature was in the high 80s, warm and clear. I sat outside in the porch with a cup of tea watching the sunset, and the (still alive!) turkeys strutting their stuff in the yard next door. The generally quiet folks who rent the house on my rear acre had friends and family over -- there was women's laughter and I could tell the fellas had been into the beer. The music drifted over inconspicuously at first -- a muffled, insistent beat, and an occasional wheedley-wheedley guitar.

And then they cranked it.

"...I was made for lovin' you, baby..."

Kiss.

It was a little too loud and as their landlady, I would certainly have a right to complain -- but I just smiled: it was perpetual summertime and I was home.