It’s pretty quiet here, and so when a car we don’t recognize pulls up to the front gate, it’s always interesting. On Monday, a truck pulled up and parked. Getting out the binoculars, I saw two women, a man, and a child who I didn’t recognize. As the couple walked up the drive, we waved, and they waved back.

It turns out they are the people who own the piece of land to the west of us. In 8 years here, we’d never seen them. It turns out that they’ve been married 16 years, and the woman had never been there. Her husband hadn’t been there for 30 or so years. (His father bought the parcel and left part of it to him when he died.) They live in Tucson.

In fact, they weren’t even sure exactly where the piece of land was, which was why they’d stopped at our place.

They were very nice. We invited them in, talked for a while, and exchanged phone numbers.

It’s amazing to me that someone could own a piece of land that they’d never even seen, but it seems to happen a lot here. People buy cheap with some expectation that the price will go up. For most people, it’s not a place they can ever really imagine themselves living.

That suits us fine.