Silver City, the First Time

Lee left me in Silver City this time, with my parents. He had received orders to a tug boat called the Abnaki which was stationed in Pear Harbor Hawaii but was being sent on a West Pac Tour which meant there was no since in my going to Hawaii. We had a week together back in the Land of Enchantment but I wasn’t enchanted with the idea of my husband being gone for a year or so while I had to stay in Silver City. I cried and cried. My family and I took him to the small airport near Silver to catch a plane to go on to Hawaii. As I sat in the car and watched his plane take off (yes, it was that small of an airport that we could do that) I cried. Daddy turned on the radio which was unusual for him to do, and the song Silver Wings by Merle Haggard was playing. It was one of mine and Lee’s favorites and was about leaving on a plane away from a loved one. It was exactly what I was feeling as I watched Lee leave.
I wondered if I would ever see him again as I knew that part of the West Pac Tour included stops at Viet Nam as well as the Philippines, Taiwan, and other parts of the world that I knew nothing about.
On top of all the stress of Lee leaving I discovered I was pregent again. This would be my second pregency as the first, in San Diego, had ended in a miscarriage. Within a month this one ended the same way.
Here I was living in a camp trailer in the driveway to my parents place, just outside their kitchen door. After recovering from the miscarriage I roamed the town of Silver City on foot since I had never learned to drive. Yes, my lovely black Duster was sitting in the driveway near the camp trailer but I was unsure of my self to be scared of driving it. So I walked. Up and down D Street from the house at the dead end section on the south end of D St. to the north end at Western New Mexico University where my sisters and I would all go to in time. Sarah and Jan were still in high school.
Up and down Market Street to the main part of Silver City. Up and down the side streets, and in and out of all the dozen or so of little stores that were in the downtown area. I took several self-guided tours through the Grant County Court House and the Silver City Museum, the University Museum, and any other historical place I could walk to. Some times my mom or one of my sisters would go with me, but lots of times I would go back by my self so that I could soak up all that Wild West history that the town was full of.
The water or something didn’t agree with my big black, tomcat Nuisance. He kept having bad cases of kidney stones and I finally gave up and had him put down. It was a very hard decision, but was to be the very first of a long line of the same decision I have had to make during my life.
Days after we lost Nuisance, our other cat Tiggy had a litter of kittens. This really kept my mind off of Lee being gone and losing a baby and my cat. Since I was using the camp trailer as a bedroom that is where Tiggy and the kittens stayed, too. Tiggy decided the box under the edge of the bed wasn’t good enough for her babies. Sometime during each night I would wake up to feel very tiny kittens snuggling up to me. Tiggy couldn’t put them all together in one spot on the bed. I would feel one kitten down by my feet, one on each side of me and usually Tiggy and the last one near my shoulders. How she could place each of the kittens that were only days old in different places, under the covers without waking me will always remain a mystery. I quickly learned to be very careful how I moved when I woke up until I located all four kittens. And believe it or not I don’t think I ever rolled on one and they didn’t suffocate. Tig had four female kittens in her first litter in San Diego but this litter was split – two males and two females. The first litter had been two black like Nuisance and two brown and black tabby like Tig. But this litter had one black female, a tabby female and a tabby male and then oddly a gray tabby male. I wanted to keep them all but knew that was silly especially since I would be living with my parents for at least a year and then not knowing where Lee and I might be living. So when a rancher friend of my parents offered to take the whole litter to their ranch for barn cats I said they could go.
I had Tiggy spayed as soon as the vet would do it after the kittens were weaned and gone.