There’s a school at the end of my driveway.

It’s a long, one-story building made of light-brown brick, with windows spaced out evenly across its entire face. If you go inside and down the hall to the right, then left, you’ll eventually come to a set of stairs that go down where the hall continues until it dog-legs to the left again. It’s not so much a second floor as much as a spatial dip in the building. If there were such a thing as a split-level school, this would be it. Along they way a person might notice a plain door set in along the first hall hiding it’s own set of stairs leading up to a small, brightly lit library. Somehow, this space is invisible from the outside.

I actually have no idea if any of this still exists, but it did when I was a student here.

Hacienda Heights Elementary, home of the mighty Hornets, once helped anchor the neighborhood straddling the line between East El Paso and the Lower Valley. The neighborhood also harbored generations of my family in my grandparents’ home, which sits directly across the street from the school.

The building, rambling in that ranch-style way, takes up an entire square block. It hasn’t been an elementary school for years, though, in spite of what the sign still visible under another sign that was laid over it might say. What it is, exactly, is a bit of mystery.

Look at it on an online map and you’ll see it’s labeled as the Hacienda Heights YWCA. As far as can be known, this has never been true. At least, there’s certainly a dearth of sweaty people chugging protein shakes coming out of there, and if a gym had ever been here it would still be the talk of the block. Another online photo shows a washed-out sign that says Comprehensive Care Center, which was probably the Ysleta Independent School District’s clinic for students and siblings. Still more digging reveals it was an international school that closed in 2023. Another mystery that has left few clues and little evidence.

It seems most likely that the campus houses the district’s printing facilities, or at least a part of it, but I can’t verify that, either. There are school district trucks parked in the tiny side lot, and every now and then you’ll see one actually arriving or departing, doing who knows what for who knows who.

The house belonged to my grandparents my entire life, and most of my mother’s. Which is why, of course, I was a student at Hacienda. My sister followed me there a year later when she started kindergarten, and we were both trailing Mom, who was one of the first Hornets decades before. If there was ever a plot of land that could be called the family homestead, this would be it.

So it’s a little weird to be moving into it.

It’s not weird in a bad way. If anything, my grandmother’s house has always felt like home. When my immediate family moved back to El Paso from Los Angeles, we stayed here and it’s the first place I can remember living. There’s a lot of personal history here; it was my mom’s first home, where my grandparents lived for decades, and where my niece and her husband spent their first independent years together. There’s a weight to it I wasn’t expecting.

Now, again, the house is providing a haven for those finding themselves a little adrift. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but changing family needs and my being laid off from my newspaper job meant my wife and I had to start looking at options. The best was moving back to the town we’d moved away from more than 20 years ago.

One of the annoying things about El Paso (and believe me, there are many) is the way people can make it really hard to move away. First, there’s an attitude of, “Why do you want to leave this desert paradise? Away from your people? You won’t be able to get good Mexican food over there and the racists are going to get you!” Booga booga, let me put my own fears on you.

And if you manage to move away, you’ll be peppered with “When are you moving back?” on a regular basis the entire time you’re outside the city limits. (Unless you belong to one of those families in which everyone, from abuelos to your cousin’s newborn, moves with you.)

Obviously, moving back comes with mixed feelings.

I’ll be happy to be closer to my family after being at distances ranging from 600 to nearly 1,500 miles away, though it means being farther away from my wife’s family. I’ll miss the green of leafy trees and wildly sprouting plant life as we trade humid climes for the arid Chihuahua desert and a terracotta landscape that in movies has stood in for Mars and the Middle East. I’ll be glad to reconnect with friends there, but I’ll miss the ones we’re leaving behind.

The house technically became mine after Mom signed it over to me about a year ago to avoid all the complications that come with probate that she already had to deal with after her own mother passed away. In that time Sandy and I have been making changes and updates, making grandma’s home into our home.

I’m connected to the doorbell camera at the house, and every now and then I’ll log in and look out from a front porch hundreds of miles away. Everything looks the same, virtually unchanged in spite of the years that have passed and everything that has changed around it.

I can still picture my grandfather’s chair, the perch where he would oversee his patch of land with the dourness of a cranky, chain-smoking buzzard. The smell of wet, sandy soil comes back when I think of playing on the covered porch, protected from the rain as an older cousin read to me and my sister, the same cousin who would gift a copy of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer to me when I was six. I remember the bright pinwheels and welcoming signs put up by my niece, along with a giant cactus that stood like a sentry by the front door.

We’ve already torn up the carpet, which was hiding the fabled wood floor I’ve been hearing about my entire life. The old, one-shaft air conditioner has been replaced and cool, refrigerated air pours out of vents into every room. A tiny stove has taken over for the full-sized one, making room for a small dishwasher. Sandy and I are talking about how we might dot the Dune-like front yard with yucca and other native plants.

Meanwhile, the school will be there at the end of the driveway, having gone through myriad changes and roles in its life, but recognizable all the same.