Testimonial 19

Why Academy Village ?

We have been living at Academy Village since early 2001. Before that our home was in Minnesota for 21 years, where our three sons grew up. Laurence was teaching Physics at the University of Minnesota. Alice worked as a Registered Nurse at University Hospital for part of that time.

We had earlier experiences with the Southwest, however. As an Air Force officer in the 1950s, Laurence was stationed at Sandia Base in Albuquerque, NM, and at Los Alamos Laboratories, NM. His pilot training in the 1940s was at Williams Field, AZ, east of Phoenix, with aerial gunnery training at Ajo, AZ. After retiring in 1989, we spent fall, winter and spring in Arizona, returning to our cottage in Maine in the summer. We grew to appreciate the mountains in Arizona and New Mexico, as well as the austere desert landscape, dry and sun-drenched, with sparse but beautiful vegetation.

At our home in the Village, among our most lasting pleasures is the sun rising over the dark blue silhouette of the Rincon Mountains to the east and, at sunset, the alternate vertical lines of sunlit ridges and shadowed valleys of the Tanque Verde to the north. We also value the ability to walk every day, usually in sunshine, around the Village loop or occasionally on the many trails through the cactus forest in Saguaro National Park, a few miles to the northwest.

Perhaps the most important asset of this Village is the friendship we enjoy with our fellow residents. In the few years that we have lived together here, we have shared many experiences. Most of them have led to pleasant discoveries about our companions and our new home; a few have been problems we had to solve together.

Authors : Laurence Cahill, physicist and former Air Force pilot; Alice Cahill, former registered nurse.