Sandpoint, Idaho

Sandpoint, Idaho

Sandpoint is in the northern part of the state of Idaho less than a hundred miles from the Canadian border. We lived there in 1966 and 1967. We never did actually get to Canada and I haven’t since but a lot of Canadians came to Sandpoint to do their shopping. We used Canadian money just like we did American money while there. It was all mixed up and no one seemed to notice any diffence in it. I doubt if that is done there now. It was a very small farming community when we were there. Now it is a big tourist area with a lot of movie stars having homes there, and the art scene like in Santa Fe or Taos, NM. Sandpoint started out as a logging and railroad settlement. http://www.cityofsandpoint.com/
Daddy went to Sandpoint before we left Tucson to look for a place for us to rent until we could find a place to buy. We would finally be getting the ‘farm’ he had always told us we could have when he retired. A place to have room for a horse. Only when he came back to Tucson to start us moving he had already bought a house in the middle of the town with a yard that wasn’t big enough to have our beagle in. A small two bedroom house that he got suckered into by a real estate agent.
The house wasn’t that bad, and it was kind of cute and it would have been alright if only there had been more land with it. It was close to my school which was the old high school converted to a junior high, and to Jan’s grade school. But Sarah had to ride the bus to the far side of town to a different school for her grade level.
Since it was a small town with very little shopping we went to Spokane, Washington to the closest military base to do our main shopping at the base commissary. That is also where we had to go when Sarah had to have braces. Sarah’s two front teeth had come in when she was in about 1st grade but she had developed a lot of teeth problems, most of them being heritary rather than from her fall, and needed to ware braces to correct them. Sarah would continue to have tooth and face problems all her life. That is the birth defect that she got the worse. Jan wore braces when she got a bit older, but when Mother asked me if I wanted them to straighten my crooked front teeth I said no. I said that there was no way I was going to wear that dumb head set and have those painful braces in my mouth. To me it wasn’t worth it. I still have crooked teeth and it has never bothered me.
With in a few weeks of arriving in Sandpoint we found there was the National Girl Scout Roundup of 1965 going on at Farragut State Park. Farragut had been a Navy base, once the second largest Navel Training Center, where Daddy had been stationed for a few months when he was in the Navy and he fell in love with the place. Only it wasn’t as good as he remembered when we got there. http://parksandrecreation.idaho.gov/parks/farragut.aspx
We went to the Girl Scout Roundup as visitors and got to see lots of things mostly related to camping but what I remember was watching a falconer exhibit a falcon and a kestrel or sparrow hawk that were trained to sit on his arm and come back when called. Plus we got to see a base where my father had been stationed many years before.
Again we were in Girl Scouts and Mother was still a Brownie leader. She had seen all three of us through Brownies and into Girl Scouts. Jan was still a Brownie in Sandpoint but I was now in a group for my age level as was Sarah. My group did frequent camping trips on the weekends. One weekend we met a large group of girls from the whole area at the base were we shopped and had a tour of the base near Spokane ending with a demonstration by the military police dogs that were trained there.
A couple of photos I found gave me the names of some of the girls that were in our troop. Kathleen Pobst, Linda Chaney, Marsha Oliver, Phillis Pobst, Patty Herman and our leaders were Mrs. Chaney and Mrs. Oliver.
That fall when I started going to Girl Scout meetings my leader had a litter of kittens in her house. I fell in love with a pretty black and white kitten and persuaded my parents to let me have him. We called him Cactus Tom, or Tommy. He and our beagle, Boots got along great but as time went on Boots learned to jump the four foot chain link fence that was around our back yard and most of the time he was gone somewhere else instead of being home where he belonged. There was a cute little female beagle that lived down the street where he could usually be found.
But my dad didn’t like the fact that the dog was always gone and one of us was out trying to find him. Or else we had to keep him tied up. And he managed to break first several ropes and then a couple of chains. He was one determined little dog. Of course it would never be thought of that Daddy could have had a higher fence built that would keep him in. He made us give up our dog instead and gave him to some one that he knew that lived out of town. This made the second dog he had made me give and I wasn’t very happy about it. Neither was my mom or my sisters.
Turned out that Mother preferred dogs and Daddy preferred cats. We still had Tom but we wanted a dog. Daddy agreed we could have another dog as long as it was small enough not to get out of the fence we had. So we checked around and a Girl Scout leader had a dachshund that was going to have puppies. The father dog was a Boston Terrier. We didn’t know much about dachshunds but Mother’s sister Elnora raised Boston Terriers so we knew what they were. Actually after reading about dachshunds we wanted the puppies to me more like their mama than the daddy. We got Bonnie when she was only about four or five weeks old. She was the brown color of her miniature dachshund mama and was a lot like her except for having longer legs and slightly shorter ears. We named her Bonita and called her Bonnie. Not sure where we got the name from but maybe was in some book I had read. Daddy wasn’t too fond of the name as he said it was a people name and dogs should have dog names but he wouldn’t suggest anything else. After all the problems with Boots, Bonnie was to be with us for a very long time and we were glad of it. She was a great little dog. Tom, the cat adopted her and would play with her like he was killing her, kicking at her belly and we were sure he would hurt her at first but he never left a mark on that tiny, cute puppy with his claws. He was really very gentle with her. Bonnie was the perfect dog for three little girls. She was always willing to play, go for a walk, or just sleep in our laps.
Right after we got Bonnie and while she was quite small Mother’s sister, my Aunt Wanda her husband, Uncle Dale and my three cousins Denise, Dana, and Diana came to visit for a few days since they had been visiting Dale’s relatives near Bend, OR. It was a great visit as I remember and one day we decided to go on a picnic in the mountains. As Bonnie wasn’t more than six or seven weeks old we decided we didn’t want to leave her home alone all day and took her with us. Since Aunt Wanda and Uncle Dale were the guests they got to ride in the front seat with Daddy who was the driver. That put Mother and I and I think it was Jan in the back seat. Seemed like Sarah, and my cousins were riding in the back of the Suburban. Bonnie had migrated from lap to lap for a bit and then settled in Aunt Wanda’ lap in the front seat. We were riding on a narrow logging road and we were the ones going up hill. We and especially Daddy had been out enough to be fairly used to going around a bend in a road and being face to face with a big logging truck. But Aunt Wanda wasn’t. All of a sudden a huge truck was right in front of us almost before we or the truck driver knew the other one was there. The logging truck was fully loaded with huge logs. It was as if we were nose to nose instantly. It startled all of us but Aunt Wanda screeched, and for some reason threw poor, sleeping Bonnie over her shoulder and the puppy landed in my lap. We all laughed about it afterward but it was kind of frightening.
I am sure she did some naughty things as a puppy but I can only remember one. That was when she decided to ‘eat’ a glass Christmas ball when we left her home for a couple of hours while we went out shopping. It was her first Christmas but she hadn’t bothered anything yet so we left her to have the run of the house. When we got home one of the small, old, fragile Christmas decorations that Mother had had for a long time was shattered on the floor. Or at least a little bit of it was. Most of it seemed to be missing. We found a few tiny pieces of glass around Bonnie’s mouth and panicked. Mother called the vet who told us to make her vomit using peroxide which we did but she didn’t throw up any glass. He said to just watch her and if she acted sick or odd to bring her in. We watched but she seemed to be fine. Maybe all of the glass had been on the floor? We hoped so. Anyway Bonnie survived and we had a great Christmas as we had snow for Christmas which we were not used to at all, since we had never lived where it snowed very much before. We got movie film of Bonnie running through the snow that was deeper than she was tall. She wasn’t really running more of a jump up to see where she was and then tunnel through the snow for a couple of feet, then jump up again. And every time she jumped up and came back down her long hound ears would fly up as if they were wings and she was really trying to fly. Of course after a few minutes of that the very shorthaired little puppy would be ready to come in, be wrapped in a towel, dried, fed something warm, and then sleep in our laps.
While we lived in Sandpoint Daddy worked for the Forest Service in the summer time and for a local gas station in the winter. It wasn’t what he and Mother had planned on when they moved there. Daddy had thought he might get on permently with the Forest Service instead of just temporary summer work. He did go to Missoula, Montana for a lot of fire fighting training and did some fire fighting as well as other work in the summer. But winters he would get laid off and would be hired by the Mohr Gas Station to do light mechanical work and to fill the cars. This was before the days of when every body filled their own gas tank. Back then you pulled into the station and the attendant would come out and fill your tank for you and check the oil. Then you would hand him/her the money, wait for change if needed, and drive off.
Daddy usually worked the evening shift and Mother would make supper for all of us, then fix a plate for Daddy covered in tin foil to keep it warm. I would then put it in the basket on my bike and ride down to the station with it for Daddy to eat on his lunch time. Sometimes we would all walk down there and sit with him while he ate supper. Frequently I could con him out of enough change to buy a candy bar out of the machine that sat inside the station by the cash register.
The couple that ran the gas station also were members of the Church of Christ same as we were. There wasn’t a church building in the town so the members of the church would meet at each others homes on Sunday morning for service. Seems like there were only four or five families at most and a lot of time it would be just us and the Mohr’s. Before long we met at their home one weekend and ours the next week. I guess my parents enjoyed it but it just seemed like a waste of time to my sisters and I.
The house on one side of us was vacant during the two years we lived in Sandpoint. It looked like it could have been haunted and we pretended it was but we were never afraid of it. We played in that yard as much as we did our own. It was overgrown with all kinds of fruit trees, berry vines, and flowers. Raspberries grew wild there and in the summer we feasted on them daily. Because the yard had gone wild the local birds found it a perfect haven. There were all kinds of birds nesting there but mostly robins.
One spring day not long after we moved there Mother looked out and saw our beagle, Boots, playing with a young robin he had caught. It was a baby bird that had probably just left its nest. When we rescued it we found the dog had broken its leg. Mother set the birds leg and it became my job to find lots of raspberries, and earthworms to feed it. At that time I was terrified of earthworms. My sisters delighted in coming up to me and saying, “Hold out your hand. I have a gift/surprise/present for you.” It took me a while to learn that they were going to drop one of those horrid, creepy, crawly, snake-like things in my hand. Of course they would also give me just enough pieces of candy, or raspberries, or other treats that I usually wouldn’t be expecting it when they would give me another earthworm.
By the time I had my own son I had gotten used to the earthworms and could handle them with no problems. I think part of the problem with the worms there in Idaho was that some of them were so big. After a good rain we would look out and see these huge nightcrawlers wiggling all over the yard. It was kind of creepy. After living where there were poisonous snakes for so long it wasn’t easy to get used to the icky worms. We were told there weren’t any poisonous snakes in our area of Idaho but it didn’t make me feel any better about those huge worms.
Knowing I had to find enough worms for the baby bird I would go out digging for small earthworms, pick them up with a pair of tongs, cut them up in small pieces for the robin and feed it. Finally its leg healed and it could fly good enough that Mother said it had to start living outside instead of in the overturned clothes basket it had been using for a cage. For several days it sat by the back door begging to be fed. Then it seemed to realize it was a bird and took up with the robins that were always around and eventually left. It was quite an experience raising a young robin and increased my interest in birds.
So since we didn’t have any pet birds at this time I bought a pair of parakeets and picked up a couple of used bird cages. I thought I would start raising parakeets as I had read about it and thought I might make some money from the babies. Maybe enough to buy a horse someday. One of the used cages must have had a disease in it from a previous bird or else the birds I bought were already infected. With in a year they had this grungy growth all over their legs and bills and didn’t last long.
I had a friend from school that was also named Barbara. She lived just a few blocks from us so I got to go to her house some. And she came to our house a few times. But she was being raised different to us. Where we had two parents and all the care parents could give their children, she and her sister were being raised by a single mom who worked. I am sure their mom loved them but she did have to work and maybe hadn’t had as good a family herself as my parents had when they were growing up. My parents were probably overly protective of us, while Barbara’s mom let her do pretty much what she wanted when she got home from school. Their house was never very clean and they did most of the cooking and cleaning instead of their mom. I knew a lot of women had to work to help support their selves and their children but this family was a bit rougher than any I had been around before. I am sure they might not have been as bad as I thought at the time now that I know what really goes on in the world and if they had been my parents wouldn’t have let me go over their. I am sure that Barb and her older sister, who had already dropped out of school and may have had a job, too, may have got into all kinds of trouble as they grew up. I seem to remember it was a bit exciting to have a friend who was what Mother considered to be on the ‘wild side’. She didn’t tell me not to be friends with her but to be careful. I do wonder what happened to Barb after we left Idaho, and where she is now.
Even though we had usually lived on Air Force Bases where there was almost no crime at all, Sandpoint seemed to be such a safe, perfect little town to me. Being overly shy and overly protected by my parents I was very cautious every where I went by myself or with any one outside the family. But Sandpoint seemed especially nice. We were allowed to go all over town by ourselves. I rode my bike everywhere or walked. I prowled through the small stores, and other public building, and spent hours and hours at the library. But knowing Barb and her family I was still cautious. And especially so when the trashman rode his cute, little, black mare up and down the ally behind our house. I adored that little horse. She was exactly the kind of horse I dreamed about having, but the man that rode her made me nerviest. I did recognize the man that rode her as one of the men who drove the truck that picked up our trash. I don’t know that he would ever have done anything wrong, but it was odd that he would stop and talk to me for a few minutes but if Mother, Daddy or my sisters appeared he would ride off. He was probably in his late twenties or early thirties, and even though I was only about fourteen I realized he was cute in a ‘bad boy’ sort of way, and wasn’t someone I should have anything to do with. I never talked to my parents about him but did talk to Barb about him. She knew him but didn’t like him either. We just liked his horse.
On one side of our house was the vacant house and yard and on the other side was Grandma Holtz. Grandma Holtz told us to call her that rather than Mrs. Holtz. She didn’t have any relatives closer than Spokane, Washington and sort of adopted us and we adopted her as part of our family. Not that we tried to intrude on her we just wanted to be her friends and to keep an eye out for her as she wasn’t young any more. She was probably in her late 80’s or early 90’s. I helped her do a lot of her yard work and Daddy did what neither of us could do, like turning over the garden area each spring so that she could plant her garden on Good Friday right before Easter. She was a stickler for planting it on that day, saying it wouldn’t grow well if it wasn’t planted then. And she always had a good garden. Her yard wasn’t as big as ours or the vacant yard but just big enough for her little garden and a few flowers in the front.
Grandma Holtz’s ( I thought her name was spelled with a ‘z’ on the end but I have an old photo of a nice looking man in a suit and on the back is written Holt Idaho but it looks like Mother’s handwriting and she could have had it wrong ) house was small, also. It seemed almost like a playhouse to me. All the rooms were nice but on the small side. Living room and kitchen and dining room, and bathroom downstairs, while a narrow staircase led up to two small bedrooms if I remember right. And if I remember she and her husband had raised their children in the playhouse. I, also, remember that she was sleeping downstairs in the dining room when we knew her as it was all she could do to climb the stairs to the bedrooms. They were used for storage more than anything else. I used to go over and help her clean house every week or so. I didn’t mind as it was easy work and she wouldn’t let me do much without insisting I sit down in the kitchen at her little table and have some sort of snack. Even then she made great cookies and always seemed to have some on hand.
She would tell us stories about being born over in Germany and when she and her husband got married they had their honeymoon on the ship coming to the United States. I think she was only about 18 or 19 at that time. I guess they must have come in through Ellis Island in New York City. I believe it might have been in the very early 1900’s. She told us that they made their way to Idaho and decided to stay in Sandpoint. I don’t remember why. I do think that they had a good bit of money, at least to start with, as they brought quite a bit of what looked like expensive glass ware and other household items with them. Since she was from Germany she spoke German and told us the correct way to say dachshund but we never could master it. Grandma Holtz explained that the dachshund was a German bred hound that was bred long and low so that they could dig very fast and go down the tunnels of gophers and other rodents. She was glad we had a puppy that was a German dog, even if she was half Boston terrier.
Toward the end of the second year we were in Sandpoint Grandma Holtz’s son or daughter, or maybe it was a grandchild, I don’t remember which it was, decided she shouldn’t be living by her self anymore and convinced her to sell her house and most of her things and move to live with her/him in Spokane. We hated to see her go but I am sure they were right even though we had been looking out for her. The son or daughter didn’t seem to be interested in many of her antiques that had come from Germany. Because we were she gave or sold a lot of them to use for very small amounts. I think she sold them to us to keep her children from getting upset that we took so many. I think it made Mother and us feel better, too, although I remember just paying a quarter or a dollar or so for each item. Jan has a lot of what we got from her. The blue cookie jar with a javalina type pig on top comes to mind. I have the clear glass spoon rest.
I also, found several old books when she let me prowl around upstairs one day. There were several Zane Gray books. I had discovered the western writer with Mothers help recently and had read several of his books. I had progressed beyond the teenage horse books and was looking for something else to read and Mother suggested Zane Gray since she had read his books when she was a girl. I was thrilled to find some old hardback books of his and quickly asked Grandma Holtz if I could buy them. She was pleased that I wanted them and let me have them for just a couple of dollars. None of them were first editions but they were old books and I still have them. I also have a book titled The Spell of the Yukon by Robert W. Service. He was a poet that went to Alaska for the gold rush and wrote the famous poem The Cremation of Sam McGee.
I think one of the reasons that Daddy had bought the house was because it had belonged to an elderly woman who was like Grandma Holtz and having to move out to go live with her son in Spokane. She was leaving most of her furniture as there wouldn’t be any place for it with her son. So with the house we got a couch, and platform rocker, a double bed for my parents and a dresser. An odd, old wooden case that may have held a radio at one time, that was on some tall legs. There was a drop down desk similar to the one I had from Las Vegas but had probably been made by a furniture company. There was a stove and refrigerator, and lots of dishes, and glassware. We still have a lot of this stuff, or at least Jan and I do.
Idaho is known for its huckleberries. Even my parents didn’t know what a huckleberry was when we moved there. We quickly fell in love with this delicious fruit. And I would give almost anything to have handful of them now. We learned to go on huckleberry outings in the fall to gather these wonderful berries. They are similar to blueberries but much better, sweeter, and bigger. Some would be as big as an inch or so across. We picked gallons and gallons of them as they were easy and quick to gather. Of course we always ate lots of them as we picked them, too. The main thing about picking huckleberries is that you have to remember that bears and other animals like them as much as people do. When we got them home we would pour them into the kitchen sink, give them a quick rinse, and then start canning and freezing them. Mother would can some of them whole, freeze a lot in the freezer, and make a lot of juice for making jelly. When we left Sandpoint we took several large jars of huckleberry juice and for special occasions Mother would make a batch of huckleberry jelly.

http://fwp.mt.gov/mtoutdoors/html/articles/2004/Huckleberries.htm

There were lots of bears in and around Sandpoint although the only one Mother and my sisters and I ever saw ended up dead. It wasn’t a good experience. We had invited friends to go for a drive with us in the nearby mountains. Sarah was the first to spot the young bear on the side of the road, eating huckleberries as fast as he could gulp them down. Daddy nearly always carried his rife with him when he went out and it was bear season since it was fall. He and Mother discussed if he should shoot it or not. They even asked the other couple and every one kept saying it was up to Daddy. I was hoping he wouldn’t. The bear was guessed to be about two years old, not real big but not tiny either. Probably out on his own for the first time. He had found a good supply of the berries and was trying to put on fat for winter hibernation. But Daddy decided to kill it. It was the first and only bear he ever killed. One shot to the neck and the bear fell over dead. The bear was loaded into the back of the old, green Suburban and brought back to our home. What do you do after you kill a bear and bring it home? Well it needs to be skinned and gutted. Mother started helping Daddy skin the bear and they wanted us to watch. Jan and Sarah started getting really upset about it and Mother took them in the house. She had a cold or the flu or something and the garage was really cold so Daddy had them stay inside where it was warm and me help him. I didn’t really want to but wasn’t about to admit it. I had always heard that when a bear was skinned it looked a lot like a human. And it did. We had seen deer skinned and butchered before but the bear was worse. On top of having to help skin out and butcher the bear we were made to eat part of it. Mother would cook it, Daddy seemed to like it and I could tolerate it but Jan and Sarah wouldn’t eat it. Jan had horrid nightmare about that poor little bear being killed and skinned for years and maybe she still does. I never admitted to my parents that I had some, too. Mother sent the hide off to be tanned and it went to Sarah as she was the one who had first seen the bear.
Hunting experiences in Sandpoint didn’t stop with the bear. Daddy had always been a deer hunter but he didn’t want to kill one of the small whitetail deer that were so numerous in Idaho. He wanted to get one of the rare and much larger muledeer. He came home late one day from hunting and had the two hind quarters of a big mule deer he had killed way up the side of a mountain. He was going to go back the next day and get the rest of the meat and the antlers. He asked me if I wanted to go with him. Of course I was ready and willing and it meant I got a day off from school. It was common there for kids to have days off for hunting and farming chores. So before daybreak the next day we left for the mountains. We rode and rode. Over this snowy dirt road to turn down another snowy dirt road, and to take another snowy dirt road. I hoped that Daddy knew where he was going and that we wouldn’t get lost. Finally he stopped and we started walking. Mother had insisted that I dress as warmly as possible. I can’t remember for sure what I had on, but I know I had on several shirts from a light turtleneck to one of Daddy’s flannel shirts on top. And what ever jacket I had that winter. Then there was a pair of longjohns, a pair of slacks, two pairs of socks and a pair of awkward snow boots that were hard to walk in as deep as the snow was. Daddy said that there had been snow during the night and most of his tracks from the day before were filled in. As we walked up the steep four-wheel-drive road it started snowing again. After about two miles we came to the remains of the deer. I guess Daddy could see just how tired I was from the walk up and we rested for a while. But then he said we should get going back down as he thought it was snowing harder and he wanted to get back to the Suburban so we could get back home before a real blizzard hit up on that mountain. Knowing that we couldn’t carry all the meat and the horns, and knowing that to follow hunting rules he needed the horns, Daddy had me carry the antlers with his hunting tag attached. Those antlers were heavy for a fourteen-year-old wimpy girl to carry. I slung them over my shoulders with the point of the antlers pointing at the ground. I had a bag slung over my shoulder with a small thermos of what had been hot coco, the remains of a sandwich and a candy bar in it. Daddy had a hunting bag with a thermos of coffee, sandwiches, and snacks in it and he hung a front hunch of frozen deer meat over his shoulder that probably weighed at least fifty pounds. It was a long trip back down and I remember falling several times and getting colder and colder. Once I was forced to have to stop and find a sheltered tree where I could drop my pants and pee. I did it as quickly as I could. Finally we got back to the car and I was never so glad to drop anything as I was that set of antlers. Neither was I about to tell my dad that I had no feeling in the tips of several of my fingers. I knew it was the first stages of frostbite but I was too embarrassed to tell him although I knew I should. Daddy insisted I drink some water, the rest of my coco and some of his coffee even though I didn’t like coffee. The extra thermos he had left in the truck was still warm. We ate another sandwich after loading the frozen meat and antlers in the back of the truck. Daddy had hoped to go back to get the rest of the meat but the snow storm was getting bad enough he decided not to. We headed back down the road. The tracks the truck had made coming in that morning had almost disappeared in the falling snow. It was well after dark by the time we got back to town and I think I slept about half the way home. I didn’t let them know that I spent lots of time in the bathroom soaking my fingers in warm water. I don’t know if there was anything else I could have done for the frostbite or not but that was what I had read in a book sometime and remembered. I didn’t make it to school the next day either as I was just to tired. I never did tell either of my parents that the tips of my fingers felt weird for several months after that trip. Mother had mounted a set of antlers from a deer that Grandpa Barnett had killed, another from a very small buck deer that Daddy had killed in Las Vegas, and later they got a set that Granddad Green had mounted on a plack himself. Somehow the antlers I hauled down off that snowy mountain never got mounted. Years later when Lee and I lived in Albuquerque Daddy gave the antlers to me saying they should be mine as I had carried them out of the mountains. I mounted them on a wooden plack and they now hang in my bedroom over my desk.
Seems we have antlers hanging everywhere. Grandpa Barnett’s set, and Daddy’s little set hang in the living room. Granddad Green’s hang in the garage needing some repair work. And one of Lee’s are in his room, and another in the spare bedroom. Daddy’s elk antlers from a big elk he killed down in the Gila Wilderness about 1980 hang on a post by the driveway. Some of his other deer antlers and some of Lee’s hang on the hay shed. I have to admit there hasn’t been a new set of antlers since 1980. After Dustin was born Lee never had any luck at hunting and doesn’t do it anymore. Daddy hunted after then but don’t think he had much luck at it either. Don’t know what it was about having a baby that stopped our hunting experiences.
After two years in Sandpoint it didn’t seem that Daddy would be able to do any better in the job department than the summers with the Forest Service and winters at the gas station so he and mother decided it would be best to move somewhere else. They decided on going back to Albuquerque, New Mexico. They knew that Kirtland Air Force Base was there and that Daddy might be able to get a civilian job of some sort there, and Albuquerque was big enough that he should be able to find something somewhere. I think it was at this point that Daddy may have regretted retiring when he did.
I remember most of the people that we knew in the town couldn’t understand why we were moving back back to New Mexico. They seemed to think that all of New Mexico was like the Sahara desert. Nothing but sand and a few small cacti. Even though we showed them pictures of Albuquerque, and the mountains near there they didn’t seem to want to believe us.
First we packed and packed. We had acquired so many things while in Sandpoint like the furniture and dishes left in the house. Daddy made several trips south with our old Suburban pulling a U-haul trailer. Finally we had sold the house and were headed for New Mexico. We took with us Bonnie, the dog, Tommy the cat as well as a parakeet, and two red-eared turtles. It was a long trip but not the first time we had ever been on similar trips. We stopped in Cortez, CO and visited with Grandma and Grandpa Barnett, Daddy’s brothers and sisters, and all my cousins on the way to Albuquerque.