He was almost 80 years old, his only love in life was dead, and he had nothing to look forward to. And so, he sold his home and moved to a care facility in hopes he'd die before long. But he didn't die and instead met a remarkable woman who showed him how to recover some of his lost vitality. The most boring man on earth, by his own description, had found some inspiration to keep living . . . but in Mexico. And so, he moved to Alamos, Mexico to finish out what he thought were just the last few years of life. Instead, Alfred lived to be 103 years old. He became a wood carver, a guitar player, a caregiver to animals, and he found a woman who became a late life lover and friend. And in the end. he was far from being a boring man.
Yavapai Wind is the story of a man who came from true Arizona pioneer stock. He grew up in the foothills of the mountainous area near Prescott, and he worked for the Post Office Department for most of his working years. He never married, but he lived with a half Yavapai Indian woman for 35 years, until she died of cancer. Alfred lives with ghosts - his woman of many years, his grandfather, father, mother, and others who'd passed away. And he lived with the ghost of a life he'd spent being boring - a good man, but a man with few interests in life other than his woman and small home in Cottonwood, Arizona. Alfred's ghosts provided the motivation for him to keep living, as they visit him from time to time in flashbacks. "We live out of duty and obligation for those we love while they are still with us; we live after that to honor their gift of love that kept us going," he said, as he neared the end of life
The book examines the town of Alamos, Mexico and a group of American expats who lived there. I do some things with the story I don't often do, and that's feature characters from other books. Yavapai Wind is almost a coming together story of people with different backgrounds and reasons for moving to Mexico. As with most of my novels, this one includes several strong woman characters. Although Alfred is elderly, he is surrounded by much younger people in Mexico, and some of them become important in his life . . . and this is because he not only adopts cats and dogs; he adopts people. Writing this book was taxing in some ways because it involved some hard charters who come in contact with a loving and considerate old man, and in that regard, it becomes a tender story. The story is purely fictional, but it is based on accounts of people who left America at an advanced age and thrived in Mexico.
I didn't write the book with an intent of getting involved in a sociological study of a family, but it happened. I also had to examine some of the failures in American society to show that life in a much less sophisticated society can often be just what a person needs. I didn't intend to attack anything in particular that has gone wrong in America, but when you find something better, that comes to light. Although this is a book of fiction, the various realities of life in both Mexico and the U.S. are factual. No particular point(s) are stressed in the book, but a common thread is that life is life and is relative to what lives it. No big lives, no small lives, just life . . . and what it becomes is what we make of it.
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