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I’ve heard folks say a house is just lumber and wires and shingles, but anyone who’s lived in one long enough knows that’s a load of cow pies. A house is a memory vault with plumbing, and ours—our little place in RoadRunner Estates—has been holding our life together for forty-three years. Buttercup and I moved in when the paint was still tacky on the trim, back when the subdivision was a brand-new idea carved out of scrub oak and hard-earned optimism.

These days, RoadRunner Estates isn’t really “estates” of anything. It’s smack in the middle of town, elbow-to-elbow with new developments, expansion, and that roundabout the city swears is progress but mostly serves as a training device for insurance adjusters. But that’s what happens when you stay put long enough: the world shifts, settles, and reshapes around you while you’re busy raising daughters and repairing leaky faucets.

When we first picked our lot, RoadRunner Estates was several miles south of town and felt like we were setting up house on our own little frontier. I was fresh out of college, Buttercup was working at the Bluebonnet Loan & Trust, and we had more enthusiasm than furniture. We laughed about the fact that we bought a house that existed just about where we used to drive to park the Fairlane 500 to watch the submarine races when we were still in high school.

Our mortgage payment was enough to make our parents suspicious. The subdivision was filled with folks a lot like us—first homes, first babies, first arguments about where to put the Christmas tree. We all grew up together, us and our houses, in a way you don’t recognize until forty-plus years have run through your fingers.

Most of those early neighbors eventually moved on. Morningwood Estates siphoned off the ambitious ones, and cities like Austin, Dallas, and even Chicago pulled others away for reasons I still don’t understand. Cold weather and traffic felt like a bad trade for a decent Tex-Mex joint and a yard big enough for a barbecue pit.

But Buttercup and I stayed.
Partly because the house held everything important to us, and partly because I’d spent my childhood packing up every three years courtesy of Uncle Sam and the United States Navy. The idea of staying put—of knowing exactly where the coffee mugs lived decade after decade—felt like rebellion in its purest form. Only the family across the street has outlasted us. Their daughter babysat our girls once upon a time; that girl is a grandmother now. Our daughters are either side of forty. Everything marches on when you’re not looking.

What drew us to RoadRunner Estates originally was the scrub oaks—gnarled, stubborn trees older than the town itself. That, and the winding streets that made the whole place feel like a walking park built by someone who valued peace and quiet. We walked those streets every day. First just the two of us in our twenties, pretending we were grown. Then with our firstborn riding in a Radio Flyer wagon that rattled like a tin roof in a hailstorm. A second daughter joined soon after, which made the wagon heavier and the hills steeper, but the talking sweeter.

As the girls grew, the walks became our nightly family forum. Vacation debates. Friend dramas. Long talks about how cruel and stupid teenage boys can be—topics that required extra laps. Later it was college decisions, career ideas, and heartaches I never saw coming. Sons-in-law eventually joined us for a time, walking awkwardly and trying to keep up with Buttercup’s pace.

Then, as it always does, life circled back around: the girls married, moved to bigger skies, and suddenly it was just Buttercup and me again. Two people walking the same streets with slower steps and plenty more to remember.

We’ve always made a point to know the neighbors directly around us—the ones who truly shape a block. Others we recognized but never learned their names. We’d wave at them in the subdivision, see them in line at Rex Hall  Drug or the Piggly Wiggly, and exchange polite nods that acknowledged shared geography more than actual friendship.

There was one couple, though—two blocks down at the corner of Bluebonnet and Yucca—who always caught my eye. Not in any dramatic way. They just looked like us. Same age, same slow gait on evening walks, same well-kept yard that hinted at pride without bragging. Their place was immaculate—mowed, edged, watered, and fertilized with the kind of devotion you normally reserve for grandchildren or classic cars. Even during drought years when the rest of us were coaxing our lawns back from the brink, theirs looked like a golf course.

And then there was Christmas.

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, the man would haul a full-scale Santa in his sleigh onto the roof, complete with eight reindeer in mid-flight. It was a display so committed, so joyfully over-the-top, it became part of RoadRunner folklore. Those glowing reindeer silhouettes against the December sky were as much a part of our holiday as Buttercup’s pecan pie.

One year I stopped during a walk and told him how much I appreciated it. He laughed, wiped the sweat from his brow, and said the electric bill hit around $800 each December.

“That’s a lot of magic,” I said.

“Tradition,” he corrected with a shrug, as if the two words were interchangeable.

A couple years ago he got himself a new pickup—a sight so bold it stopped me mid-step. A 2024 Ram 1500 TRX Final Edition in Delmonico Red Pearl. The kind of truck that looks like it was designed by a caffeinated teenager with unlimited crayons. Wider than a church pew and louder than Fourth of July on the Pecos. The thing had 702 horsepower, beadlock wheels, adaptive Bilsteins, and more technology than NASA used to land on the moon. If you sneezed near it, the hood scoops probably measured your lung capacity.

When we walked by, I nodded toward it and said, “Nice truck.”

He tipped his hat. “Thanks,” he said, casual as can be, even though he was leaning against a machine that could outrun a biblical plague.

I thought about stopping and asking to look inside. Maybe ask why a man his age bought something that could tow the Alamo uphill. But I didn’t want to slow the walk, and I didn’t want to turn my admiration into an obligation for him to give me the grand tour.

Several months later we passed while he was outside checking the mail.

“Still likin’ that truck?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said. “It’s a keeper.”

Buttercup nudged me after we’d gone a few steps. “We should invite them over sometime,” she said. “We’re both retired now. Might be good to have some folks our age to sit and visit with.”

She was right. They had always seemed nice. Familiar. Like a parallel version of ourselves living two blocks down.

We never quite got around to it.

Then one week the Ram wasn’t in the driveway. Not unusual at first—maybe he was traveling, maybe it was in the shop, though a truck like that doesn’t strike you as one that needs much encouragement to keep running.

But the days passed. The wife’s car remained in the garage. The big Delmonico Red beast didn’t return.

We never saw it again.

In mid-November a FOR SALE sign appeared on their lawn. And right after Thanksgiving, something shifted in a way that made my stomach drop. All eight reindeer, Santa, and the sleigh—forty-plus years of that couple’s holiday tradition—were piled at the curb. A lifetime of December magic waiting for either a visionary or a garbage truck.

Buttercup and I stood on the sidewalk longer than usual.

“Maybe they’re downsizing,” she whispered.

“Maybe,” I said. But it didn’t feel like downsizing.

People talk about “Silver Divorces” these days—folks splitting up after thirty, forty years. I didn’t think that was it. The house looked too still, too hollow. My gut said it wasn’t the marriage that failed. It was probably his heart.

He’d always appeared healthy enough. Fit, even. But you can’t always see the cracks that matter. Maybe hauling Santa and the reindeer onto the roof each year finally caught up to him. Or maybe the payments on a $125,000 supertruck were heavier than the hood scoops suggested.

Whatever happened, the Ram was gone. And after a few more weeks, so was she. The wife’s car disappeared from the garage. The house sat lonely and undecorated for the first Christmas I could remember.

RoadRunner Estates doesn’t stay empty long—Fort Stockton grows in its own slow, stubborn way—but winter is a miserable time to sell a house. The FOR SALE sign stood straight and defiant through windstorms and cold snaps.

I found myself thinking about them more than I expected. A couple we’d waved at for decades but never knew beyond a sidewalk greeting. They were part of the landscape, part of our rhythm, part of the quiet continuity that made this place home. Losing them—whatever the reason—made our neighborhood feel suddenly older, like a story missing a chapter.

One morning Buttercup squeezed my hand during our walk.

“You alright?” she asked.

“I should’ve gotten to know him,” I said. “We lived two blocks apart for half our lives.”

She nodded. “We can’t know everyone,” she said gently. “But we can care.”

Her words sat with me the rest of the day, warm and heavy as a quilt.

I hope the wife is alright. I hope she has family somewhere who can fold her into their holidays. I hope someone rescued Santa and his team before the sanitation truck rolled by, because some traditions deserve a fighting chance.

And I hope—selfishly, maybe—that whoever moves into that house is somewhere close to our age. Someone who understands the value of watering the lawn even in July, who waves when we walk by, who might join us on the patio someday for a beer, swapping stories about kids and grandkids and the strange way life unfolds without asking our permission.

When the SOLD sign finally appears—and it will—I’m going to stop by and introduce myself. After all these years, it feels like the least I can do.

RoadRunner Estates has carried us through newborn nights, scraped knees, teenage catastrophes, graduations, weddings, empty nests, and the slow settling of two hearts grown comfortable in one place. Forty-three years. It’s seen the girls go off to build their futures, and it’s watched Buttercup and me grow older without ever growing apart.

Houses age. Streets change. Trees fall. Neighbors come and go.

But if you stay long enough—if you pay attention—you learn that every goodbye in a neighborhood is also a reminder.

We’re all just passing through, tending our little corners of the world for as long as we can.

And when our time comes to go, I pray someone walking past will see the empty driveway, the quiet windows, and think:

I hope they’re alright.
I hope someone remembers their Christmas lights.
I hope they knew they were part of something.

Until then, Buttercup and I will keep walking these same winding streets, waving at the folks we know and the ones we don’t, grateful for every year we’ve been allowed to stay.

Because in RoadRunner Estates, as in life, staying put long enough becomes its own story.

And it’s one worth telling.

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