Maxine St in Albuquerque

 Maxine St.
When Dustin was about two we had to sell the house on San Jacinto to keep from loosing it. We certainly didn’t want to sell it but it was the only way we could see out of our financial dilemma. When it did sell we had to get out of the house quickly and I found a house to rent only a few blocks away on Maxine St. So we packed everything including dogs, cats, and birds and moved. I was still doing baby sitting and for a while we had things better without having to count our pennies quite as much.
It was on here that on a trip to the pet store for bird seed I saw a black kitten that looked to be about six weeks old in the middle of a busy intersection. I pulled up in the middle, opened by door, scooped up the kitten and tossed him into the back seat of the car. We had another cat. When I got home and showed it to Dustin, he gently reached out to pet it and I told him it was a baby kitty cat. He looked at me with this question look and said, “My baby kitty cat.” I think I was glad that I couldn’t find where the kitten belonged after putting an ad in the paper and contacting animal control. Spook became our newest member of the family and was quickly accepted by the other two dogs and cats.

We met Beth and Phil Huddleston while we lived here. They became very good friends for the next ten years. The had recently moved to Albuquerque from Ohio and Phil got a job at International Harvester where Lee worked. I’m not sure where they were living at that time but I know that they bought a house in the South Valley area of Albuquerque not to long after we met them. Beth and I quickly became friends. She wasn’t much older than Lee but had had her two boys when she was quite young and with her first husband. Mike and Fred were living with them at that time and they were just out of high school. They had a black Great Dane named Midnight. Midnight was the first Dane I had ever been around. She didn’t seem as big as I had always thought Danes were but then she wasn’t one of the really big ones. She was a sweet older dog. Not long after they bought there house which had about two acres with it they got a mixed breed dog that they named Wezel. She was a strange dog but they loved her. They also bought a couple of horses. One was Money, a nice bay mare that was a quarter horse cross. I don’t remember much about the other horse. Seems like they didn’t care much for her so they sold her and got a Appaloosa gelding named Cappy. Again they didn’t have him that long and sold him then got an Appy mare that they named Whisper. Whisper was a buckskin mare with a few white spots on her butt. She had one blue eye and one brown eye. I really liked her. While they had Whisper and Money they bred both of them. Money to a big black Thoroughbred stallion that belonged to someone they knew nearby to them. Someone else near them had an Appy stallion they bred Whisper to. Money had a black filly they named Velvet and Whisper had a buckskin colt which they sold later on. I really liked that colt and would have given anything to have had him but knew I had no way to keep him. I didn’t think I could even afford the feed for him if they kept him at their place so I hardened my heart and never said any thing about him to them or Lee. Dustin seemed interested in the horses but not overly. Since I had never been able to have a horse and it had always been so difficult for me to love them so and not be able to have one I never encouraged Dustin to have any thing to do with them. I didn’t want him to have the heartache I had always had from not being able to have one. I did want him to be more interested in dogs but he wasn’t.
Dustin started putting words together in a sentence at what I think was a very young age. While we lived on Maxine he started asking me all too frequently during the day, “my daddy come home now.” He might have been able to put the words together to make since but he still had no concept of time. All I could do was tell him “Not yet. After while.” Of course when Jan heard that Dustin was putting words together like that I think she was jealousies. JJ was still pointing at things and just grunting when he wanted to ask for something.
It was while we lived here that Lee bought a table saw, radial arm saw, a used lathe and a band saw. Knowing nothing about how to use these saws and make things out of wood I was thrilled to see what Lee was doing. He made shelves, candlesticks, plant stands, and tables. I quickly leaned how to help him sand the wood, put stain and polyurethane on what he made and to use the band saw. For years we have made howling coyotes and other wooden toys and small pieces of furniture and tried to sell them at arts and crafts sales as well as garage sales but never were able to make any money at it. But I have lots of nice wood furniture in my home that Lee has made with a little help from me. And everyone I know has been given a howling coyote and a dream catchers. While we lived on Nyasa Lee, Dustin, and I would build a large addition 20 x 20 feet on the back of the house to be a family room with a woodstove. It had a short staircase that lead to a balcony running along the room where it joined to the house that was 6 feet wide by 15 feet long. It was quite an undertaking but looked really nice when finished.
Then when we move to the house we are in now on 10th St. we gave the saws a real workout building horse shelters, hay and storage shed, a firewood shed, tool shed and a covered porch off the back door as well as lots of fencing to confine the horses.
We were not happy living in the house on Maxine and decided that Lee would quite his job and we would move to Silver City and see if life there would be better than it was in Albuquerque. On top of everything else my parents seemed to be getting older and not doing well. Especially Daddy. While we were here the doctors at the VA Hospital found a small tumor in his peturatary gland at the base of his brain. They did some sort of surgery that was new at that time. They went in through his nose and into his brain and removed the tumor. He seemed to do well afterward but got quite upset when his dad died while he was in the hospital and none of us were able to go to Grandpa’s furnal in Cortez, Co. because we weretaking care of Daddy. I had been so glad we had made one trip to Silver with Dustin when he was about a year old and Grandma and Grandpa were able to see my son. Plus they got to see Dustin and JJ together at that time. That was also when I got to get some photos of Dustin with a very old Bonnie and Tag and Smokey, the dogs and cat we had first got long before I ever thought of leaving home, getting married and having a son.