Silver City, NM Again

Silver City, NM again. April 1983 to November 1983
Moved back to Silver City hoping to stay there. We managed to get the apartment next to the one we had when we lived there before next to my parent’s home. One of my thoughts in moving to Silver was that we would be near enough to help them if they needed it. But a lot of the time I felt like they thought I was intruding on their life. Mother seemed to be changing a lot, and I didn’t care for the changes I was seeing but I thought it was probably because they were getting older.
Of course this move meant going with three cats, two dogs and several cages of birds. It was very different for the dogs and cats here than in Albuquerque. The dogs had to be tied as there wasn’t a fence. After a week I thought it was safe to turn the cats out some as they kept begging to go out. Ginger and Spook did fine, coming back in an hour or so when I called them. Cotton, on the other hand, wasn’t about to come back. The big old white cat had pulled the same stunt a couple of times before. He would go out and not come back for a couple of days. This time it turned into about a week, although this time I did see him frequently, unlike before. He just wasn’t about to come to home. Our apartment and Mothers’ house sat at the end of a dead end street. Behind the houses was a small creek and a hillside that had trees, brush, cactus, and lots of native critters. Usually once each day I would be looking for the crazy cat and would see a splotch of white moving through the brush on the hillside somewhere. I didn’t worry about him to much. I knew he could here me so he knew where I was, and I knew there were lots of mice, chipmunks, birds and things for him to catch to eat if he wanted to and I knew he could hunt as he had brought me mice and birds a few times in Albuquerque much as I disliked him doing it. After all he was a Cat. After about a week he did show up at the door one morning and came in when I let him. He had lost a couple of pounds and seemed thankful for the food I gave him. After that he always came back each night while we were there.
Since Lee couldn’t find a job he went back to Albuquerque and was able to get his old job back. Most of the time he lived in the back of the Scout with an occional night at a either Phil and Beths or with Larry Berry. Larry worked for International Harvester, too.
Since he didn’t get an apartment to live in we were able to save some money and we planned to move back up to Albuquerque as soon as we had enough to find a house. Of course this was way before the time of cell phones. There was an 800 number where Lee was working so frequently he would call us on it. When he did he would talk to Dustin for a few minutes. It didn’t take long before Dustin decided that he had a dad that visited him on the weekends and a dad that was in the telephone. When the phone would ring he would start in about wanting to “Talk to my daddy in the phone.”
While we were here Jan, Jim, and JJ were living in a mobile home in Playas, NM as Jim was out of the Army and working at the Phelps Dodge copper smelter there. And Jan was pregnant again. I can’t remember if Sarah was living in Silver at this time or if she was living somewhere nearby, maybe White Water, AZ, I know she taught school there for a while, but she must have been close. She and I decided to give Jan a baby shower. We did it at Mother’s house and invited a lot of Jan’s friends. Other than that I don’t remember much about the shower. I do remember that Jim had brought her and JJ up and they stayed the night with Mother and I took them back to Playas the next day. I also remember she never let me forget that while we were at her place in Playas Dustin taught JJ how to use on of the dull table knives that come with silverware to use as a screwdriver on the screws as they tried to take Jan’s kitchen chairs apart. We caught them at it. Dustin was already quite taken with any kind of a tool. He watched everything Lee did with them and tried to do the same. I guess since he couldn’t find a screwdriver he used the table knife. We had bought him a set of toy plastic tools for Christmas that year but he much preferred his dad’s tools. We always tired to watch him with them as we knew they could be dangerous. Luckily he never got hurt on one. And as to why he and JJ decided to take the chair apart one can only guess at, as he had never tried to take one of my kitchen chairs apart. Just lots of other things. Later Jan was to tell me that JJ remembered about using the table knife and tried to use one on several different things that had screws in them.
It wasn’t but about a week or so later on October 19, 1983 that Jan, Jim, and JJ returned to Silver City so that JJ’s little brother could be born. Jan and Jim were hoping for a girl and didn’t have a name picked out for a boy even though I had told them it would be a boy. They quickly decided on Eric Joseph. I went to the hospital to see the baby and when Jan told me his name it just didn’t seem right to me for some reason. I said I would just call him Joe as I had always liked the name. It stuck. Until he started school he was usually known as Joe or Joey. To this day I think of my nephews as JJ and Joe even though now they use their proper names of James and Eric. Of course as a baby and until Dustin started school we usually called him Dusty and sometimes I forget and still call him that as does Lee and his Aunt Jan. Thankfully none of the three boys get offended at being called by their baby names. In fact Lee had other nicknames for Dustin – Squirt being his favorite and one he still uses when he is talking about our son to us.
Not long after Joey was born that Lee and the realtor that he had been working with found a house that they thought we might be able to afford. At this point I wasn’t going to be picky at all. I just wanted a place where we could all be together as a family again. Lee said it was a brand new, two bedroom home which sounded good to me but was in Rio Rancho, NM. I had been to Rio Rancho which was to the northwest of Albuquerque but I didn’t really know much about the community except that it used to be part of Albuquerque and had a few years before voted to become their own little town. At that time it was a little town – only about 10,000 in population.
I’m not sure of the exact date we signed the papers but it was about the middle of November. I left Dustin with his grandparents and drove to Albuquerque meeting Lee at Phil and Beths. I spent the night there while Lee was at work. He was working nights. The next day we signed the papers and then I got to see my new home when we did a walk through of the house with a representative of the builder AmRep. To me it looked huge with a huge yard while in reality it was a smallish house on only a quarter of an area of land.
Lee and I celebrated by having dinner out and renting a hotel room for the night. The next day we both drove back down to Silver, he in the Scout and me in the Duster. Our friend Larry Berry followed us with his pickup. He was going to help us get the last of our things. I had already packed as much as I could and Lee had brought a lot of our things to Albuquerque each weekend when he would come down to see us. It was all stored in a shed on Phil’s place. This included the pool table that we had. We had bought a pool table while we were on Maxine and hauled it to Silver. Lee dismantled it and brought it back to Phil’s in pieces in the Scout. Mind you it was an older, full size or eight foot long table with three quarter inch slate in it. Very heavy.
We loaded what was left in Larry’s pickup, the Scout and the Duster. I put Ginger and Cotton in one cat carrier and Spook in the other. I think they rode with Lee and Dustin in the Scout as that little boy insisted he had to ride with his daddy. I put Sandy and Kelly in the back seat of the Duster and filled the front seat beside me with two small birdcages, one with my pair of canaries and one with the parakeets. Next to Larry in his pickup I added two more cages with finches in them.
Our little convoy left about dusk and made the trip back to Albuquerque stopping several times at cafés to load up on coffee and let the last load of coffee out. By traveling at night Dustin, the dogs and cats, and the birds mostly slept which was a lot better for everyone.
We unloaded all of the animals and what we had in the three vehicles at our new home. It took several days to get everything that was stored at Beths to our place. On Thanksgiving we celebrated at Phil and Beths home with a big dinner. As usual we had our wedding aniverery very close to Thanksgiving. It looked like it was going to be a good start to our new life in Rio Rancho.