Kirtland AFB, Albuquerque, NM

“So, what have you been doing today, Mom?” asked my son, Dustin, when he called the other night.
“Not much,” I answered. “Just the same old, everyday stuff.”
“Stuff? What stuff?”
“Well if you must know I’ve done a bit of housework, dishes, laundry, cleaned the horse pens, watered the horses and the yard, watched some TV, and checked my email. Anything else you want to know? Like maybe my life history.”
“Nah. Not tonight. It would take to long. You need to write it down.”


Ok, so that is what I am doing. Writing down my life history. Not that anyone would really be interested in it. Including my son. But here goes anyway. To start with my name is Barbara Jean (Barnett) Borror. I have never done anything extremely important to the world, haven’t saved anyone’s life, haven’t done anything that made headlines nor do I expect to before I die, but I would like to my story down for posterity or for any very bored person that might decide to read this. I guess I am just one of those very unimportant people that the world is mostly made up of. Maybe that is the way you are, too. We are but would the world have been any worse off if we had never been born? If I can entertain just one person for a few minutes this might be worth it.

Albuquerque, New Mexico: the First Time
On August 3, 1951 a Thursday, if I am correct, I was born to Catherine (Green) Barnett and Robert Leroy Barnett in a hospital on Sandia Army Base near Albuquerque, New Mexico. At that time my dad was in the Air Force, stationed on Kirkland Air Force Base which was next to Sandia Army Base. But Kirkland didn’t have a hospital that had a maternity ward and Sandia did so I was born on an Army Base.
My parents lived in a small apartment in what is known as the North Valley of the Albuquerque, NM area, and in the South Valley. I have an address on an old postcard the Daddy sent to Mother postmarked Mar 26, 1954 from Joplin, MO. He must have been there on some sort of training. It was sent to 3303 Express (I am not sure of the spelling of the street name) Dr. SW, Albuquerque, NM. I believe but I am not sure that for a while we lived in my grandmother’s home on Don Louis Rd NW in the same area when she decided to move to Amarillo, Texas. My granddad, Andy Boyd Green, my mom’s dad had died when Mother was just a few months pregent with me. I guess, from what I remember Mother saying Gram, as I called my grandmother, Alma Beatrice (Coe) Green wasn’t too happy in Albuquerque and moved to Amarillo where she had found a job.
My next couple of years where spent there. I don’t remember much about it. I do know that it must have been a fairly happy time for my family. What I think I remember has been encouraged by the photos that my parents had and the stories they told me about those times. They took quite a few photos of me, each other, family and friends and the house we lived in. And on trips they took. They continued to do this all their lives. I know it was mostly Mother’s idea. Daddy liked pictures but not the way Mother did.
Mother came from a family of picture takers. From all the photos that she had of her parents and some of her grandparents it seems to me that as soon as the very first cameras became available to the general public the Greens and the Coes must have invested in them. I have always felt that my mom’s family wanted to preserve their family life as much as possible and their best ways of doing it was with family stories and photography. It seems to be born and bred into their families and was passed down to my mom and her sisters and then on to me and my sisters. The Coes and the Greens didn’t write down their family histories as much as we would have liked but the urge to do so has come down to me and my sister, Jan and hopefully to my niece, Cyndi.
That is one of the reasons I have decided to write my life history. It may not be the most important part of world history that there is but I would like to know that it is written down.
Story telling and photography weren’t the only things that were important to me and my family. Not even the most important part of our lives. For me and my family our children always came first, followed by our pets. I think that a love of all things living was, also, bred into us. Especially a love of cats, dogs, and horses. This was followed by a love of flowers, plants and the whole outdoors. Many of those old photos are filled with animals, and flowers as well as the people who raised them.

In those first photos of me there was frequently a collie dog named Sport. Sport had belonged to Gram and Granddad Green, who had always had a way with training dogs, as well as his horses and mules. When Gram moved to Texas she left Sport with us. Mother would tell me of how she wouldn’t have been afraid to leave me in the front yard unattended as long as Sport was with me. Not to say she ever did it, she just knew Sport would have taken care of me if she had left me alone. She said that after I started walking many a time she watched me head for the edge of the yard and Sport would always be between me and the edge. He never allowed me to leave the yard. He would let me walk up to him, lean on him, push, and pull on him but wouldn’t let me get by him.
Sport was also a wonderful watchdog. The kind that would bark and not allow a stranger in until told it was alright, but then he would let them in and leave them alone. Until one day a workman of some kind came to the door and my mom went to let him in. But Sport refused to stop barking and stood between Mother and the door as he did when I tried to leave the yard. Mother decided to listen to her dog and didn’t let the man in. She told him he would have to come back when her husband was there. She said she didn’t know what prompted her to do that but she said she had a hunch that if Sport wouldn’t let the man in, she shouldn’t either. Who knows what might have happened if she had.
This and other stories taught me to pay attention to how my pets reacted to strangers. I still do it. If any of my dogs didn’t like someone, neither do I. I really believe that animals can ‘read’ people better than another person can. In most situations we are taught that all people are good. Watch the news on TV. Read the papers. It’s not true. And I rely on my dogs to help me figure out who to trust and who not to trust.
I don’t really remember Sport but the memories of my first dog are good ones. I have never had another Rough Coated Collie like Sport but there have been lots of other dogs as well as a large number of cats, several horses and a verity of small animals like fish, lizards, insects, and birds. These pets will fill a large part of my life history so if you don’t care for animals I suggest you don’t read this. But if you do read it maybe I can change your mind and teach you about the joys of having and loving animals.
Mother told me that my first words were the usual ‘mommy’ and ‘daddy’. But she thought my third word had to have been ‘horsey’. Parades were a big deal to my parents, and since they enjoyed them they would take me to them. Mother said I would get so excited when the horses would come down the street, and quickly leaned to call out ‘horsey, horsey’. Ever since then I have associated the sound of marching band music to the sound of horse’s hooves on pavement.

Mother used to tell me how when I was about a year old she took me and a basket of wet clothes out into the yard. She set me down in the sand under the clothes line to play and started hanging the wet clothes on the clothes line. At some point she looked down to see that I was playing with something that moved. Being concerned she checked and found that apparently she had set me in a nest of just hatched baby hornytoads. She said she would have thought that at my age I would have been putting them in my mouth, but instead I was holding one very gently and watching it. She said the hornytoad was small enough to easily fit in my baby hand so she was sure they had just recently hatched. She was familiar with hornytoads and wasn’t afraid of them. Hornytoads aren’t really toads but are a spined lizard that lives in the desert. They don’t have any teeth and eat mostly ants. They can flatten their selves and play dead with the best possum or they can run like heck and hide under the least little bit of leaves or sticks as they are usually the color of the sand or dirt where they are living. I don’t know if playing with them as a baby had an influence on my liking for them but I have really liked the little lizard all my life. When I was about 40 years old there was a young Navajo Indian man working where I worked. Someone had asked him about spirit animals, and he said everyone had a spirit animal. Several of the people there asked how they could know what their spirit animal was. He told a few people what he thought their spirit animal might be. I hadn’t really joined into the conversation as I though he was just hamming it up for the ‘white women’ as he frequently did anyway. I thought he was having fun and I was enjoying watching him do it. Then he turned to me and said that my spirit animal was the hornytoad and the white bear. I laughed and said I didn’t know about the white bear but I did know about the hornytoad and told him the story of when I was a baby sitting under the clothes line. He just smiled as if he had already known. Later I was to find out he was right about the white bear, too.
The horned lizard really can shoot blood out of its eyes. I have seen it do this. Its main food is ants or similar insects. And he doesn’t have any teeth. The belly of a horny toad is probably the softest thing I have ever touched. They are getting rare and I think are almost endangered. It is such a shame as this is such a neat little creature. They do not make good pets as they are difficult to care for, most dying within a few months of capture. Also it is illegal to have them in some states.

http://www.hornedlizards.org/hornedlizards/hornedlizards_frame.html

http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/reptiles/horned-toad.html

I guess I must have been about a year old when someone gave me a penny as people were prone to do with little kids back then so they could buy a piece of candy or gum. I didn’t know what a penny was so I put it in my mouth and swallowed it, according to Mother. She was horrified. They rushed me to the doctor, who assured them there was no problem. That the penny would work its way through me in a day or so. Mother took the trouble to check my diapers and make sure the penny did come out. The penny went into my baby book. Some years later mine and Sarah’s baby books would be lost in a move and never found.
At about this same time Mother had taken me with her on a shopping trip somewhere in Albuquerque. We were crossing a street and I was lagging behind. There was a car coming so Mother grabbed my arm and pulled me along. She didn’t realize that she had dislocated my shoulder until I started crying. She took me to the chiropractor that she and Gram went to on a regular basic and had for a number of years. He was able to put my arm back and there was never a problem with it. Mother and Gram were always warning me to never pull on a child’s arm as you could easily do damage.
When we lived in Gram’s house we had a neighbor next door that was to be sort of famous later on, although most people have never heard of him. He was an artist named Eugene Henry Bischoff. He was known for his very realist paintings of landscapes and Indians. He was born in Germany in 1880 but studied art in New York and California, and was living in New Mexico by 1937. He and his wife Kay had known my grandfather before he died. Gene did a life-size painting of Granddad doing his taxidermy work in his shop after Granddad died. There is a faint outline of my parents in the back of the painting. Gram kept the painting in her home until she died, when I got it for a while, and now one of my cousins has it. Gene did a small watercolor painting of cactus in bloom that he gave to my parents as a wedding present. I, also, have two prints of Indians about the same size, 18 by 12. I would give anything to have more of his painting but the few that are on the market are way out of my means. I don’t remember it but the Bischoff actually had a television at that time. Gene and Kay were almost like grandparents to me, and later my sisters and I called Kay Grandma Kay. They would have me over to watch TV with them from time to time and Mother said I liked the ballet but that may have been because it was something they were fond of and encouraged me to like it. We kept in touch with the Bischoffs after we left Albuquerque, but Gene died in 1954. The Bischoffs also ran a small publishing company in Albuquerque called EuKaBi Publishing ( It was a combination of their first names and last name.) There are a few published prints of Gene’s work and a series of high quality coloring books for children or adults that had black and white drawings similar to Gene’s paintings. Kay had written information about the Indian or landscape on the following page with suggestions on how to color it. You might say they were similar to the paint by number sets but for coloring but without the numbers. Somewhere I have several of the books which are now out of print. We moved back to Albuquerque when I was in high school and Grandma Kay was able to come to my graduation.

My Family in Silver City, NM

Vacation Trip To Meet Our Families Oct. 1971
It was the first time either of us had ever been to Silver City, NM. My family had moved there not long after I joined the Navy and I hadn’t been to see them since, due to meeting Lee and getting married. Now we were going there for out first visit as a married couple to visit my family. It was, also, Lee’s first time to ever be in my home state of New Mexico and I felt like I needed to show all of it to him. So we were going to a part of the state I had never been to either.
http://www.silvercity.org/index.shtml


My mom had lived in Silver City when she was a girl. She and her family moved there when she was ten years old. A doctor in Texas has told my grandfather that he might live a bit longer if he moved to Silver City which was a good town for people with tuberculosis. Granddad had been ‘gassed’ while he was in France during World War 1. He was having health problems because of it and was told he only had a few months to live if he stayed in Texas. So he sold his small farm in Colorado City, TX and moved his family to Silver City. Mother told us they packed their family of five and a few household goods into and old Motol T Ford and took off. When they arrived in Silver City Granddad got a job as caretaker for some small house rented out by the Cottage Sans Tuberculosis Sanitarium on the outskirts of the small town.
It wasn’t long before Granddad; Boyd Green fell in love with being a gold and silver prospector in a county that has always been known for

prospectors looking for gold, silver, copper, and turquoise. I wish I could remember all the stories Mother told me about their adventures in Silver City and Grant County during the few years they lived their. At one time Granddad had a small turquoise mine that he got quite a bit of good turquoise out of. He learned to polish the best pieces and gave a lot of it to Alma, my grandmother that I called Gram, and to my mom and her sisters. Mother was able to pass on a lot of hers to me and my sisters. It will always stay in our family. Granddad’s turquoise was more of the green stone than the more popular and common blue colors.
http://www.epcc.edu/nwlibrary/borderlands/21_mining.h
http://www.silvercitymuseum.org/A_about.html

While Lee and I visited with my family we got to visit the area where that old turquoise mine was. My parents, also, took us on a tour of the high points of Grant County while we were there. We went to see into the famous Santa Rita Copper Mine that had been being mined by the native Indians when the Spanish first came into the area and is still being mined today. They took us to see a small part of the Gila National Forest and the

edge of the Gila Wilderness Area. I have a photo of Lee sitting on a huge chain that was around a small area where a huge wild grape vine was to keep people off of the grape vine. The chain was said to be the anchor chain from an old ship. The vine and chain was right beside the Gila River at one of the entrances to the Gila Wilderness. It was our first time to actually be in a Wilderness area where motorized vehicles where not allowed to go. The next year the Gila River flooded out of its banks higher that in recorded history and took that grape vine and chain away to who knows where. I never heard if the chain was found again. http://www.fs.fed.us/r3/about/history/gila/index.htmhttp://fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_RU4?ss=110306&navtype=forestBean&navid=091000000000000&pnavid=null&cid=null&ttype=main&pname=Gila%20National%20Forest%20-%20Home

Near by we visited the Gila Cliff Dwellings. It was a long walk into where the cliff dwellings actually were from the visitor’s center but well worth it. It was like nothing Lee or I had ever seen before. Those tiny, ancient little rock houses where native Indians had once lived. We were walking the same trails that had been walked by true Americans hundreds of years before. How wonderful their lives must have been or we can hope they were. Of course the burning question that all archeologists of southwestern history have always wanted answered was why did the cliff dwellers leave their idealic homes on the edges of the cliffs scattered over New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah? No one has ever been able to answer that question to the ratification of all historians.
http://www.lycos.com/info/gila-cliff-dwellings-national-monument--gila-wilderness.html
http://www.destination360.com/north-america/us/new-mexico/gila-cliff-dwellings



Another day in our travels we went to the ghost town of Mogollon, NM where there was a big mine back in the 1890’s. By the 1920’s it was a ghost town. It still is but is becoming known as a haven for artist and another way into the Gila National Forest. Tourists that really want to hit the back country of New Mexico go there. There is a small store, and a couple of Bed and Breakfast places. It is the way into a camp ground called Willow Creek where my family and I had a very memorial camping trip when I was about 8 years old.
http://www.ghosttowns.com/states/nm/mogollon.html

http://www.mogollonenterprises.com/
Near Mogollon is another tourist attraction known as the Catwalk. http://www.southernnewmexico.com/Articles/Southwest/Catron/TheCatwalk.html

It was a water pipeline put in by some miners back in the 1890’s to carry water to the miners of the town of Graham, NM near the slightly larger town of Glenwood. The pipe ran through a very narrow canyon. That canyon is now a scenic trail for those that want to dare to walk it. The pipe has been replaced in most places by metal ‘catwalks’ that are only a couple of feet wide and bolted to the rocky sides of the canyon where there is no way for a trail to be made, and they take the hiker higher and higher up the canyon. Of all the places I have visited over the years I still think that The Catwalk is one of the most unique trails I have ever been on. Not only is it unique it is absolutely beautiful with the fast flowing little river or creek or stream as you may chose to call it running along the trail or beneath the catwalk all the way along trail.
And there are some times that the catwalk can’t be visited as the catwalk does flood out every few years and has to be rebuilt by the forest service. Each spring when the deep snow from the high country above the catwalk decides to melt the waters of the river flood and overflow and it can be very dangerous to walk the catwalk. Every so often the snow melt waters are so bad that the metal walk ways are swept away. If you plan a trip to The Catwalk try not to do it in the early spring and always check with the local forest service centers to find out if it is safe to visit.
These trips to visit and see interesting and historic places in and near Silver City increased my interest in our American outdoors, history, national parks, and forest tremendously. I have never lost this love of the outdoors, mountains, deserts, and especially nature and wildlife. It has grown stronger as I have grown older. I have tried to pass on this love for nature to my son as my parents passed it on to me.

A Home & A Baby

 11101 San Jacinto, NE Address July 1978 to July 1982
After a couple of months at the California address we decided to find a better house in a better neighborhood. We bought our first house at 11101 San Jacinto, NE in July of 1978. It was a cute house with a Swiss chalet look to it, and wasn’t the normal look in Albuquerque which may be why it appealed to us. I took to selling Tupperware when we first bought the house to help make ends meet but it was still hard. In a sort of desperate move to keep from losing the house just months after we bought it we offered to let Dave Boggs rent one of the bedrooms from us. He agreed but wanted to bring his girlfriend, Rosalie with him. Dave and his family were from Claremore, Oklahoma and had gone back for a visit recently where he had met Rosalie and then convinced her to come to Albuquerque. A few months later they got married and moved into an apartment but they lived with us long enough for us to get over the rough spot of being first time homeowners.
The house was a nice large three bedroom, two bathroom house. A den had been added on next to the kitchen and a small concrete deck ran the length of the house and about ten feet wide. There was a huge built in fireplace/grill on one end and it was walled in about three feet up with screen wire the rest of the way up to the roof. When we were trying to buy the house the FHA people said the little greenhouse on the back wasn’t up to code and looked tacky and wanted the owners to remove it. I told them I wouldn’t buy the place if that happened. I used it lots for my houseplants in the summer and even some in the winter. Plus we used it to let the cats out without going outside all the way. There was even a doggy door for the dogs so they could get in to the greenhouse but not all the way into the house. It was on the south side of the house and collected lots of heat. In the summer it frequently got to hot but in the winter I would open the sliding glass doors to the den and let the heat in the greenhouse into the house. It was our first solar heat.
Both my sisters got married soon after we moved to this house. Janice and Jim Edmonds were married in July 14, 1978. Sarah and Mike Hogaboon were married soon after.
It was about this time that I got a job working for Tree Top Nurseries. They were at a location on the corner of Tramway and Montgomery several miles from the house but by now I finally had my driver’s license and was driving the Duster. At this job I drove a big, old white van from one office to another taking care of plants that they had. They contracted with the place I worked with for the plant watering service and I did the work. When I wasn’t doing that I worked at the small nursery learning more and more about plants. And I wished that I had gone into agriculture while I was in college. It seemed I had found my preferred line of work after trying several different things. Secretary in the Navy, museum helper, flower shops taking FTD orders and making fruit baskets and general helper, and selling Tupperware. I really liked working with plants. I liked growing them. I guess I was taking after my parents and grandparents more than I thought. Plus, Lee really liked growing plants. I preferred houseplants at this time and Lee liked gardening. We put a small garden in the back yard. The back wasn’t big enough for more along with room for the dogs and the huge, old cottonwood that was there. We had a bit of lawn in the back and a better one in the front with a picket fence around it. It took several tries but we finally got a redbud tree to service in the front yard. There was a big boxwood hedge between us and the neighbors on one side that we didn’t care for and just the drive ways on the other side.
Across the street were our best neighbors, Shirley and Jim. Their kids were in high school. Shirley was a kindergarten teacher and Jim did security work I think I remember. They loved dogs and cats the way Lee and I did and several of each. We never became great friends but they were nice.
It was not long after we moved into this house that my youngest sister, Jan, married her sweetheart from when she was in college, James Edmonds. Jim was in the Army as he felt he might make a career of the military the same as his dad had done. At this time they were stationed in Kentucky.
And my other sister, Sarah, had married Mike Hogaboon, whom she had known in college. Mike was a music teacher, too, and had a job teaching school in Grants, NM. Later Mike would go into the forest service as a fire fighter for several years until Sarah couldn’t handle him and his problems and they would get a divorce.
By this time Ginger was pretty content to mostly be a house cat but Cotton would sneak out now and then. He really liked to lay up on the roof to the house and watch the traffic and kids from there. We hadn’t realized it when we moved in but we were only a block from a grade school and each morning and each afternoon there were lots of little kids walking up and down the street on there way home. But Cotton didn’t like strangers trying to pet him when we had company. One day some guy knocked on the door and said his cat was on my roof. I went out and looked and it was Cotton. I told him it was my cat. He started getting mad and wanted to argue with me. I wasn’t in the mood. I said, “Look, there’s the ladder. You go up and get him and if he’ll let you, you can keep him. But my white cat doesn’t like strangers and if it’s Cotton he’ll scratch the hell out of you.” The man started to argue some more. “I’m not going to go up on the roof and get that cat,” I said. “And if it’s your cat, eventually he’ll come down and go home if he wants to.” After some more spuddering the man left. I guess he didn’t want to go up on the high-pitched roof and maybe try to pick up someone’s elses cat that might not want to be picked up. And I don’t think he wanted to argue over a cat with a pregnant woman in her yard. He left and I never saw him again. It wasn’t long before the cat came down and it was Cotton. I made a point of trying to keep him in for a while as I didn’t want that man or someone else trying to steal him.
I was pregnant at that time. After ten years of trying to have a baby and having six miscarriages, I was pregnant again. I had made it through the first few months when I usually had the miscarriage and had quite my job as I never felt good and couldn’t do it right any longer. Now I was showing and surprising the neighbors. Shirley and I talked one day and she said “When did that happen?” I laughed and said about eight months ago. I had lost so many babies I didn’t want to let anyone know until I couldn’t hide it any more. I didn’t even tell my parents until I was about five months along. After so many miscarriages before I was convinced that this baby wouldn’t make it either.
My GYN doctor, Dr. Dennis Ready had done lots of testing but there was never a good answer as to why I lost all the others and this one – well I don’t think I could have kicked him out.
I had one theory but there is no way to prove if it was really the answer or not. Even Dr. Ready thought I was nuts when I mentioned it to him. Due to the fact that I had to quit working we were, as usual, very short on money with only Lee working. But that fall Lee and I had gone deer hunting and Lee killed a nice size buck. With very little money for food we ate mostly deer and beans. That meant that I was eating very little food with all that un-natural junk salt, and preservatives that food that is made in a factory has. The deer had lived on good mountain grass. We had butchered the deer and frozen it with in about 48 hours after it was killed. I did fry a lot of the deer in oil but a lot of it was also boiled and added to all those pinto beans. The beans were cooked like Mother had taught me in a pressure cooker. I added some boiled deer meat, salt, pepper, and a handful of chili powder. Maybe the chili powder helped too. New Mexico chili is supposed to be good for any thing that might make a person ill accept maybe indigestion and heartburn.
Or maybe it had to do with the fact that I think that our son was conceived that fall while Lee were on an elk hunting trip to the Jemez Mountains. It was the only time Lee ever was able to get an elk permit. Elk permits are done by a drawing as there are a limited number of permits. We saw a couple of bull elk but they were always to far away to even try to shoot at. A few weeks later we went to Silver City for the deer hunt. Not only did Lee get the deer he got his turkey that year, too. At that time if you got a deer permit it included the turkey but we never seemed to see any turkey when hunting, although we did see lots when we weren’t hunting. Lee didn’t even have a shotgun with him which is usually what people use for turkey. He killed it with his deer rifle, almost gutting it with the shot. It was a young bird but, boy, was it tough. Since we were visiting with my parents Mother helped me pluck the feathers that turkey and as we thought it would be tough we boiled it first and then fried it. That is the way that Lee had been taught to fix squirrel when he was a boy by his mom.
As a boy Lee had been taught to hunt before he even started school. By the time he was five he had a .22 rifle that he would go squirrel hunting with and he said a lot of the time it was all the meat he and his family would have to eat that day.
After much thought and many discussions we settled on a name for a boy, Dustin, but were never sure of one for a girl. The baby was due to be born June 15, so Daddy brought Mother up about then. It was to be three more weeks before he would be born. It was hot, and I was big with the ‘basketball’ as Lee frequently teased me about. And then my feet, ankles and legs started swelling. About June 30th I went in for another checkup. Dr. Ready looked at my feet and ankles and said we would like me to check into the hospital on July 2nd if I hadn’t had him by then. Of course I didn’t so off I went on July 2nd to the hospital and to have my labor induced so I would have this baby that didn’t want to be born. Another reason Dr. Ready wanted to induce my labor is that he wanted to be the one to deliver my baby after all this time and he was going on vacation on July 4th. On the morning of July 3rd he came in and broke my water and we got into having a baby in earnest. He came back about noon and said he would see me that evening as he didn’t think the baby would come until them. At about 2 pm I was suddenly fully dilated and the nurse called his office in a hurry. His office was in the building next to the hospital so he was there in just minutes with his office nurse who asked if she could go in the delivery room with me as she, too, was anxious to see me have a baby after all this time. I wish I could remember her name but it is lost to me. As Mother and Lee didn’t seem to want to go into the delivery room I was only more than glad to have her come in and hold my hand. She had held it to many times to help me through a D & C procedure after the miscarriages.
Dustin Lee was born right at 3pm on July 3rd, 1980. He weighed 7 pounds and 8 onzes. Dr. Ready held him up for me to see and told me to touch him and count his toes, but I said no, I wanted to hold his hand. For some reason it seemed important to do that. I didn’t know then that those tiny, pink important to do that. I didn’t know then that those tiny, pink baby hands would one day be big hands that would be able to stroke, and gentle scared, and upset 1000 pound horses with ease.
Dr. Ready started to put the baby on my chest but then handed him to the nurse saying she would clean him up. I was so thrilled to finally get birth to my baby boy after all those long months I didn’t think too much of it and then I started to fell really faint and dizzy. Dr. Ready got back into position and told me to push to expel the afterbirth. I don’t know if I did or not. Then I remember someone said ‘she’s bleeding heavy,’ and then someone was putting another IV into my right arm and I already had one in my left arm.
I’m not sure how long I was there while they got the bleeding stopped but finally I was in the recovery room and a nurse brought Dustin to me and said to feed him. She didn’t tell me how but turned and left in a hurry. Maybe she was busy and didn’t realize it was my first time. After a few minutes we got the hang of it and Dustin started nursing. Only later did I find out that while Dr. Ready had been taking care of me a nurse had cleaned Dustin up and introduced him to Lee and Mother.
By then it was late and I guess Lee and Mother went home to make the phone calls to let Daddy and Lee’s family know about the baby. The next day was July 4th and it was the quietest one I ever had as far as the fireworks were concerned but now the noise was the crying of babies. On the 5th Dustin and I were allowed to go home. When Lee and Mother came to pick us up they found me standing by the bed staring at my son with a pile of tiny baby clothes beside him. I had no idea how to dress him let alone how to chance a diaper. I had never done anything with a human baby in my life. I never did the baby sitting that most teenage girls do. Mother laughed and said, “Just pretend he’s a kitten that you need to put clothes on.” So I did. With her help.
I was kind of nervous about going home and it wasn’t just that I didn’t know what to do with a baby. We still had two dogs, Sandy and Kelly, and two cats, Ginger and Cotton. How were they going to adjust to a baby? Several people had suggested that I should get rid of the dogs especially Sandy or make them stay outside all the time because they would be jealous of the baby and would hurt it. But I couldn’t get rid of them or even make them stay outside. I really didn’t think there would be a problem. Neither did Lee, Mother, or my neighbor, Shirley. And we were all right.
Lee went in first and made sure the dogs were outside. I carried Dustin in and laid him on the cough. In a few minutes Lee let the dogs in to see me as they were somewhat upset that I had been gone for a couple of days. But they knew things were different. They came in real easy instead of rushing in like normal to greet me. Their noses were in the air and they were smelling and looking. The sent of the baby must have been strong to them. Sandy eased up to look at me and then at the baby. I had grabbed the camera and as the big, 100 pound German Shepherd laid her head down by that tiny baby and gave a big sigh I snapped a photo. It was as if she was saying, “Well, it’s time you brought home this baby and let me see him.”
None of the dogs or cats ever tried to hurt Dustin even though they had never been around a baby. And Sandy was eight years old while Kelly was four. Ginger was six and Cotton was five. It wasn’t that they were young animals. One of the worse things the dogs did was to always be going into the bedroom and checking on him after I would put him to bed. Sandy was the perfect height to lay her nose on the bed and poke it though the bars of the crib enough to touch him with her wet, cold nose and wake him up. Kelly wasn’t tall enough but she tried.
The cats, Ginger and Cotton would simply jump lightly into the crib and sleep with him. Daddy through fits about that as he believed the old wives tale about a cat stealing a baby’s breath and killing it. Lee and I didn’t but would move the cats out when we found them sleeping with him as we didn’t figure Dustin needed to eat cat hair. It was odd that as much as both cats were prone to sleeping on mine and Lee’s legs I never caught either of them actually laying on the baby. They seemed to know that they shouldn’t. They just seemed to want to be near him the same as the dogs did.
I remember Mother stayed with us about two weeks after Dustin was born which was a really big help for me. During that time I learned how to take care of my baby son. I learned to diaper him, bath him, and dress him as well as nursing him. I was determined that my baby would not be a bottle baby. I had plenty of milk for him and he thrived and grew quickly. Of course Lee was a very devoted father and my dad was thrilled to have a grandson after having three daughters. Even most of his brothers had had all girl kids. Boys were a rarity in our family.
I don’t remember much about those first few months with Dustin except that he could be a wonderful baby one moment and screaming with colic the next. I was never able to determine what caused the colic except that it was because I was a first time mom and wasn’t sure what to do with him a lot of the time. I remember walking miles and miles with a crying baby held in every position I could think of that might relieve his tummy ache, which is what colic is. I remember using every remedy I any one suggested with little success. When Lee was home he would help, and frequently Shirley came over and walked the floor with him to help. A lot of the time the rocking chair did more good that walking with him did. I began to feel I was glued to that rocker. I bought a used stroller and that would help as long as I was pushing it back and forth. Sometimes I gave him a warm bath several times a day as it might help. If I did luck out and get him to sleep without a spell of colic and screaming I found that any noise was bound to wake him up. When he was born I thought that I would expose him to all kinds of noise hoping he would be the kind of baby that would sleep though anything. It was not to be. I was already used to putting pillows over the phone so that it wouldn’t wake Lee up, who mostly worked evenings or nights. The vacuum would wake him, also the dishwasher, the dog barking and especially the doorbell, which got disconnected. I don’t think I have ever had as many door to door salesmen as while Dustin was a baby. I even put a sign on the door that said if they were selling or soliciting to do not knock on the door, just go away. I added a Beware of Dog sign and if they did knock on the door I met them with Sandy. Sandy was very good at making salespeople leave quickly.
I still detest anyone that goes door to door for any reason or calls me on the phone trying to sell, solicit, or ask for donations.

Dustin was just the beginning of boys in our family. Jan, my youngest sister, was also pregnant with her first child. She had marred James Edmonds a few years before. Jim was in the Army at that time and their first year or so was spent in Kentucky. Now Jim was in Korea and Jan couldn’t go but Jim had plans to be able to come home in time for the birth of their child. He made it home in time to be at the birth of his son. James Marvin Jr. was born on October 6, 1980 just three months and three days after Dustin was born.
My parents were now double thrilled to have two grandsons. But Jan was living at their house and it was pretty hectic there for several months from what I understood as Jan got an infection after JJ was born. Jim spent a lot of time taking care of her and his son with Mothers help and Sarah was there, too. Of course Daddy had to make more problems by demanding that JJ be picked up and held every time he made the least bit of noise which was not good for the baby or any one else’s nerves. And of course Daddy was to go to get up and help take care of the baby.
I remember that JJ weighed over eight pounds, had black hair and would have dark brown eyes soon. Dustin had to be exactly the opposite with very light, blonde hair and blue eyes. Both boys took after their dad’s families in looks. Wee were never able to live close together do to job situations and, still, Dustin and JJ were very close. We did everything we could to make sure that our only child and his three cousins got to see each other as much as possible. JJ got a brother, Eric Joseph, three years later on October 19, 1983, during a few years that Jim worked for PD Copper Smelter in Playas, NM. After a year or so he decided to enlist in the Air Force and was stationed in Homestead, FL. Three years after Joe was born Cynthia Julia was born in Florida on October 12, 1986. I always teased Jan about being able to have all three of her kids in October which is also the month that her husband was born in.

Lee and I were still having trouble making ends meet. I did not want to have to go back to work and we figured that a babysitter would cost more than I would make with the job. There was a new neighbor, Peggy, across the street and next door to Shirley. Peggy opened a daycare in her home as she didn’t want to leave her one year old son with a sitter either. I decided to try some babysitting, too. The first and best kids that I got were two little girls in grade school that came every afternoon after school until one of their parents would come pick them up. They were usually with us for about two to three hours each afternoon. Crissy was six and the older girl was eight. I wish I could remember her name. They were wonderful girls never causing any trouble, doing their homework, watching TV, playing quiet games, and they loved Dustin, the dogs and cats. And the animals got along with them. Even Sandy adored them.
Later I took in two other kids, a boy and a girl, the same ages and it was trouble from the beginning as I suspect it had been with their previous sitters. I ended up having to tell their mom I couldn’t take care of them. There were also a couple of babies and toddlers that didn’t seem to stay long either.
When Dustin was eleven months old Lee’s mom, Goldie, sister, Linda, brother, Don, and his mom’s brother Dwight and his wife, Mammie came to visit us from West Virginia. It was the second time they had come out to see us, the first time being while we lived on Aztec. We had made a couple of trips back east to visit them, once right after Lee got out of the Navy and again the summer right before we moved to Albuquerque. I was totally stressed out as was Lee. By now Dustin was almost walking and could move with lightning speed anywhere in the house. He was not good with strangers as most babies that age aren’t and refused to have anything to do with his grandma, aunts, and uncles. I think Dustin refused to walk while they were visiting on purpose to frustrate his grandma Goldie. As soon as they left he was walking –er – running.
Lee’s family was afraid of Sandy and Kelly so the dogs were banned to the backyard which they couldn’t understand. Cotton went and hid but Ginger was a pest doing her best to upset Goldie by getting in her lap every time she sat down, especially if it was to eat. The poor women would freak out, being afraid to even push the cat off of her lap. Ginger was banned to the bedroom.
We were still very broke but wanted to make a good impression by showing them a little of the Albuquerque area. We knew it had to be in our budget and places we could also take Dustin. The first time they had come we had gone to the desert as they had never seen one, even digging a few small cholla cactus plants for them to take back. We had also gone to Old Town, the top of the Sandia Mountains and the Albuquerque Zoo. Plus they had wanted to see a ‘real Indian’. I had read there would be a small parade on Central to honor some Indian doing and we took them but all the Indians were just riding down the street in cars and trucks. They were disappointed and found it hard to except the fact that Indians or Native Americans were just like everyone else. This time I think we just went to a few stores where they could buy some souvenirs and out onto the desert some. We didn’t do much except play with Dustin and take lots of photos. They wanted to try some Mexican food but we knew we couldn’t afford to take them to a restrant and we knew how much of a brat Dustin could be in one. We used that as the main reason for not going and I cooked a big Mexican meal of pinto beans, enchilada’s, tacos, Spanish rice, and chili con carne. They weren’t thrilled with it. Goldie and Linda wouldn’t even taste anything that had chili in it. So we were glad we hadn’t taken them out for a true Mexican dinner. Thankfully I had opened a can of corn, and another of green beans.
I think it was just as bad for them as it was for us and all because they wanted to see our son, their grandson/nephew. That was the important part. A little baby boy that we had all be waiting for so long. Lee and I were married almost ten years when we finally had Dustin. Lee was thirty years old and I lacked one month being twenty-nine. Dustin and I were both born on the 3rd of our birth month.
To me the number 3 became a special number. I had thought so before Dustin’s birth but when he was born on the 3rd I knew it was. Both of us had been born right at 3pm on the 3rd. I was the oldest of 3 girls and my mom was the oldest of 3 girls. Lee was the middle child of 3 children in his family. My sister, Jan, had 3 children. Between us we had 3 boys. As of this writing Lee and I have owned 3 houses. For almost ten years we had 3 black and white cats that were brothers from the same litter. I have had 3 female, Siamese cats, so far. At this moment we have 3 black cats. (But the number and color of our cats seem to be always changing). Several times we have had 3 dogs at the same time. Right now I have 3 boys’ horses, if you can count one big horse and two ponies. And my mom, who was such a big influence in my life, died on the 3rd of September, 2003.
Before Dustin was born I had bet a woman who lived down the street from us and became a casual friend named Joyce. She had two daughters just starting high school, Lisa and Erin, and a son, Jake. I don’t remember how we met but I do remember that Lisa hung around a lot, and on a few days when I couldn’t take care of the kids I babysat, Joyce and Lisa would take them; like when Lee’s family came.
Lisa was as horse crazy as I had been at that age and one day she and a couple of friends asked if I could take them to a nearby riding stable to spend a couple of hours riding. After calling Joyce at her job to OK it with her I took them. At the time we had agreed on I returned to pick them up. I was early and they weren’t ready yet. I didn’t mind. I was enjoying just looking at the horses as it was the first time I had been near a horse in years. I had pushed the thought of ever having a horse to the farthest corner of mine and tried to keep it buried there, even though I still watched every old and new western TV show and movie that I could and read every book I could on horses mostly sticking to the fiction books as nonfiction would make me want one even worse. This day was to be special. I had parked near a small corral that only had one horse in it. A sorrel quarter horse mare. I got out of the car, got Dustin out of his carseat and stood holding him a few feet from the corral and the mare. She looked at me with her big dark eyes and it seemed to me that somehow we connected. Maybe it was the fact that I had recently had a baby, (at that time I think Dustin was about 8 months old) and I could tell she was expecting her baby soon. She wandered a round in a small circle and moaned a few times, then straddled her legs and two tiny hooves appeared under her tail. With another big groan she sank to the ground and the little baby horse was out. The mare stood up quickly, turned and began cleaning up the baby. In seconds the big head of the foal was up and in a couple of minutes it was trying to stand. I looked around for someone that might be concerned about the mare and her new baby and at that time a man came running out of a barn and walked up to the man. He looked at me and I said she just had it. He sighed and said something about how he had been watching her all day expecting it and as soon as he had to turn his back on her for a few seconds to take care of something she had it. He petted her and we both noticed that there were several people starting to gather around the corral including the kids I was to pick up. He stooped over, picked up the baby, and said he would take them inside where he could check them over better and they wouldn’t be bothered by gawkers. I agreed it was what I would have done, too, but I was sorry to see him walk away carrying the foal with it’s mama following him. Year later when Dustin decided he was going to become a professional horseman, I always felt that he had been “marked” by that experience that day of seeing a horse have her baby, even though he was less than a year old and had no idea what was happening. In fact I’m not even sure he really saw it happen. I had always heard of children being “marked” by something that had happened while their mom was pregnant or soon after they were born. (Children who hear lots of music while in the womb become musicians, or a child that escapes a fire while a baby becomes a firefighter, a child that follows his grandparent in the garden becomes a farmer.) I also remembered all those books I had read while I was pregnant with him. My favorites were Louis L’Amour who wrote about cowboys and western adventurers http://www.louislamour.com/aboutlouis/biography.htm
And Dick Francis who wrote about England and race horses www.dickfrancis.com
Was it possible Dustin knew what I was reading about before he was born? Had I been marked by the horses in the parades my parents took me to see while I was a baby? Of course it was also in our genes I think. Lee grew up on a farm where he worked with the neighbors when they used a big old draft horse to help cut and haul logs out of the woods. Both of my parents had grown up in a farm environment mostly where they had horses and mules. Granddad Green was a cowboy in Texas as a boy and I remember Mother and Gram saying he was raising and training mules when Mother was little. I remember the story of her wondering into the mule pen when she was just walking. Their dog, a pointer, named Don followed her and kept his self between the mules and my mom even getting kicked to keep her from being kicked.
I have a photo of my Grandpa Barnett when he was seventeen with his horse which looked to be a black horse (it was a black and white photo of course, since it would have been about 1900) The horse looked to be a Morgan type horse. My second horse was a black Morgan. I still cry when I think of my BlackJack being gone.
I have another old faded, photo of Gram’s dad with a horse named Old I get the impression he is a quarter horse or as they were know then a ‘steel dust’ horse. Yes, it was in our genes, even if mine and Lee’s parents never had horses. Another story I remember from Mother is when she and her cousin, Johnny Green, were about five or six and would go out into the field to ride on one of the horses. They never wore shoes in the summer so Johnny would use his toes to climb the horse’s leg to where he could reach its mane and pull himself up on the horses back. Then Mother would climb its leg with her toes to where she could reach Johnny’s hand so he could help pull her up behind him. She said it was an older, real gentle horse named that they could ride without even a rope to guide him.
If I had thought about something ‘marking’ Dustin when he was born I would have thought it was the dogs or cats. Except for Lee’s mom and sister I think everyone on both sides of our family like if not outright loved dogs and cats. Oddly Dustin loves cats but doesn’t care for dogs now that he is grown. Maybe it had something to do with the cats sleeping with him and helping keep him warm while the dogs would wake him with their cold, wet noses. Both Sandy and Kelly would have done anything to protect him. I remember putting down food for the dogs, turning a round to do something for a minute to turn back to find Dustin eating commercial dry dog food between the two dogs while they waited patiently for him to finish so they could then eat. Dustin would have been crawling then but not walking yet. To learn to walk he would crawl over to Kelly, who would let him pull on her until he was standing and then she would very, very slowly walk with him while he held onto her. He would grab handfuls of hair and skin in his little hands and pull which I am sure didn’t feel good as he did it to me, too. He would also pull on her ears, tail and squeeze her around her neck. She never seemed to mind. He tried it with Sandy who didn’t mind either but Sandy was taller and it didn’t seem to work as well. Kelly was just the right height for a baby to walk with.
When Dustin was about a year or so my friend, Joyce, gave us a pair of zebra finches she had as she and her family were moving. Dustin adored the two little birds as they hopped here and there in their cage and called ‘cha chee, cha chee’ which prompted him to call them Gee Gee’s and then all birds became Gee Gee’s in his baby language. After reading up on the lively, active birds I bought a nest added it to the cage and soon we had baby Gee Gee’s.
Hummmm I wondered if I could make a few dollars breeding the prolific little birds. Probably not but it might be fun. So we soon had several cages of zebra finches. I then added a pair of canaries and a pair of parakeets. I had had parakeets and canaries as a girl and enjoyed watching, listening to, and caring for the birds. I found I could sell a few of the babies to some local pet stores for about $4 each. Not much but it paid for their feed.


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.

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.

Living in Rio Rancho, NM

Rio Rancho, NM November 1983 to April 2003
There was a cinderblock wall around the backyard dividing our yard from the neighbors, except that it hadn’t been finished across the front. So the first thing we did was put up a board fence on the south side and a big double gate on the north side so that we could let the dogs out without having to tie them. The big gate was so we could drive a truck through to the back if we wanted to.
Our house was a new home built by AmRep a big housing developer in Rio Rancho. With the cost of the home came some landscaping in the front yard. A lawn, two trees, and some evergreen scrubs. Of course no one told us how much the water bill was going to be if we tried to keep the lawn alive. And keeping it alive meant getting out every time the sand storms came to sweep the sand off the grass. Yes, that is right I sweep the grass or else used a water hose to wash the sand off.
The first time my parents came to visit they said that it must sort of be like being pioneers. There was only one street to the west of us before the desert with nothing but sage and tumbleweeds. And the town wasn’t much. Just one main street named Southern Blvd. To this day it is still the main way through the town though the town has grown by leaps and bounds from the 10,000 population when we moved there to about 62,0000.
http://www.rioranchoregionalchamber.org/city.htm
We moved the cottonwood tree that the landscapers put in the front yard to the back. At first I thought we had killed it but in a few months it put on three shoots from the bottom of the truck and we cut the original dead truck off. By the time we moved from there in 2003 that little tree was at least ten feet in diameter. The three shoots had grown together up to about six feet above the ground where about four branches took off and the tree was about thirty feet tall or more. Dustin used to climb it and for awhile there was a tire swing from a strong branch for him to swing on. I used to really get mad at hot air balloonist that would fly over in the early morning and see how close they could come to the tree reaching out to grab handfuls of leaves off of the top. A loudly barking dog or two on the ground kept a lot of them away. I kept hoping one would get too close and get caught up and crash. But as of yet it hasn’t happened. One day Dustin happened to mention that about a week before he had climbed up in the tree and fallen out. He said it knocked him out for a little while. He didn’t say so but I know he knew he wasn’t supposed to climb the tree and was to embarrassed that he had fallen and would tell us for a while.
Over the years we added two spruce trees that we got a permit for and dug in the Jemez Mountains and put in the front yard. They were only about four foot tall when planted and were taller than the house when we moved. There was also a purple leaf plum, a mimosa, a redbud, and a jumpier in the front. The redbud had come up volunteer in the San Jacinto house when Dustin was born and when we moved I dug it, put it in a pot, and took it with us. We put it in the front yard where the cottonwood had been. There was a boxwood scrub that got to about 12 feet and an apricot tree plus a lilac on the west side of the house and some other scrubs closer to the street. On the north side by the driveway was a couple of poinciana bushes, (they were from seeds I had gathered at Mother’s house in Silver City) a century plant and a cholla cactus. In the back we added some lilacs, two cherries, a peach, a plum, a silver maple, and a shed for tools. There were about a dozen roses scattered in the back and in the front and at different times I had all kinds of flowers, and a vegetable garden. We only had a quarter acre of land with a house on it but I made the most of every inch of it while leaving enough room for the dogs and Dustin to play.
We hadn’t been here very long when one of the guys that Lee worked with wanted to sell a pair of older snowmobiles and a trailer. So we bought them. At first Lee had to do lots of repair work on them to get them running decently so that we could take them to the mountains and play with them in the snow. I am sure we did some really dumb things with them. It seemed like every time we got about ten miles or so out into the woods with them, one or both of them would quite running. That meant spending hours in the middle of no where working on them to be able to get back to the truck. And this was with a three year old boy with us. Dustin never seemed to mind how long it took. He never seemed to get cold, or tired of playing in the snow. And of course I loved the change to take lots of photos.
It had been about this time that my little 110 camera had quite and Lee had bought us a Pentex 35mm camera. I fell in love with it. I really liked being able to take photos that had a more professional quality to them, although it never was. At least they were better than what I had taken with the 110.
We lived here for about twenty years so there were a lot of different pets during that time. With in a few months of moving here we lost Ginger our Siamese cat. It about broke my heart.
Not long after Beth’s son Mike found a puppy laying beside its dead mama in the street as he was walking home. Beth didn’t want to try to raise her and called me to ask if I wanted her. I said I would try. I had taken in Rowdy when he was only about three or four weeks old but this tiny little pup didn’t even have her eyes open yet. She was mostly black with white feet and chest. We thought she might have been shepherd or lad or a cross but it didn’t matter. Surprisingly she survived. I used a regular baby bottle and canned goats milk that I mixed with water. Dustin was thrilled with the puppy and always wanted to help feed her. In a few weeks she was running around the house getting into all kinds of trouble. Sandy, Kelly, and the cats, Cotton and Spook had no problems excepting Bo as we named her. Bo was bigger than Kelly when grown but smaller than Sandy. At that time I still thought she was mostly shepherd but years later when I knew more about Border Collie’s I have wondered if she wasn’t a good part BC. Bo wasn’t to be with us much more than a year when she escaped and was hit and killed by a car.
Our friends Phil and Beth had let a stray cat stay at their place that had a litter of kittens. Dustin kept wanting to take one home one day when we were visiting and I finally gave in. She was a small dark tabby that looked very much like the tabby cat, Tiggy, that Lee and I had adopted right after we were married. After much debate she was named Oriental Teak which was shortened to Tikki. Dustin was four at the time he chose her and he and that little cat were good friends all her life. I remember having several photos of her reaching her foot into a cat of cat food then licking the food off her foot. She frequently ate this way.
About a year later we lost our old German Shepherd, Sandy, who was about 14. Wanting a puppy I went to see some that a woman was giving away. They were a shepherd mix she thought. At least mama was a shepherd. When I got there I could tell that there had been several fathers to this litter of pups and at first none of them appealed to me. As I was looking them over and just about decided not to take any of them, I noticed that one had gone to sleep on my foot. One I hadn’t noticed before, and it looked like I remember Sandy looking like as a pup. I said I would take that one even though Lee had said to get a male not a female this time. Well if he had wanted to make sure I got a male he should have gone with me to pick it out. Since Dustin was now seven I wanted this to be his dog. I wanted him to learn to help with caring and feeding for her. After considering all names Lee suggested D.D. to stand for Dustin’s Dog. But it was not to be. She was my dog. She and Dustin never did get that close. Dustin never has been much of a dog person. He loves cats but not dogs.
About the same time we got D.D. Beth got a Great Dane puppy she named Maggie. A year later Maggie had a litter of twelve pups and we took one, a male that I named Midnight Moon Chaser. Chase was a lot like the Dane Maraduke in the funny papers. I named him Chase for the way when he tried to chase us with his big, ungainly feet he kept tripping over them. And because D.D would try to herd him like a herding dog. It was quite a game between them; the clumsy pup and the smaller shepherd running round in circles. Chase was black with white legs, chest, belly, and tip on his tail. He was very tall when grown about 40 inches at his shoulders I would guess as he came up to my waist. A true Dane he loved everyone and but I thought it was great that everyone that saw him and didn’t know about Danes was terrified by this huge dog walking right at my side.
Our black cat, Spook had disappeared. He just never came home. It is bad when you loose a pet but worse, I think, when they don’t come home and you never know what happened to them. Knowing how much I had liked my old Siamese Ginger and that I was missing Spook who was probably part Siamese she gave me a Siamese kitten. Only this one had white feet. I named her Stormy as it rained the day we got her and she created a storm in our house as most kittens do. Stormy and Chase quickly became friends. I got a great photo of Stormy as a tiny kitten, playing with Chase. Chase had his head laid on the back of the couch that angled so that he could stand behind it. Stormy was on the back of the couch at the level of the big dogs head. He had his mouth open and she was sticking her head and feet into his mouth slapping at his teeth and tongue. At first I was afraid he would bite down on her but he never did.
I loved Chase but Lee and Dustin didn’t care for him at all. I knew I was doing wrong by the big dog keeping him in a small yard while I was at work and it seemed I didn’t really have time to do much with him when I was home. Mother told me of three little boys that had lost their parents in a car accident and were living with their grandparents in Silver City. The grandparents had agreed to let the boys have a Great Dane but not a small pup. I didn’t want to but decided to take Chase to Silver, meet the kids and see the place where he might be living. It wasn’t perfect but the yard was bigger and the boys loved him at first sight and he them. I left him there. I always hoped it was the right choice.
Now we were back down to two dogs, D.D and the older Kelly. Kelly was really showing her age and I frequently had to help her get to her feet. It wasn’t long before we would loose her, too.
I think it was about this time that I got a job with a plant nursery called Green Acres for a few months and then a job as a cashier at a nearby Walgreen’s. I disliked being a cashier but a job was a job. But I leaned how and it was to be my main job, off and on, most of the time I have worked.
When Dustin was about four we had a family move in next door named Lucero. Diane had one daughter, Melanie, when they moved in, but had another one while they lived there, Valerie. Dustin and Melanie became close friends as they were only children for the first two years that she lived next to us. Melanie was not quite a year younger than Dustin but they played really well together. Sometimes they ran back and forth between our two houses so much Diane and I never seemed to know which place they were. Melanie couldn’t seem to understand why Dustin wasn’t around for her to play with when he started school, as he started a year before she did. It seems as if Dustin was about ten when Melanie and her family moved back to Albuquerque. Diane and I still exchange Christmas cards.
I was thrilled when Dustin was five and finally old enough to go to school. He only went half days to kindergarten but he liked it, and I sure needed to have a break from him part of the time. Being an only child he really needed to be able to spend more time away from me and with other kids his age. Dustin when to school all the way through grade school and then junior high or mid school in Rio Rancho. I was glad to be able to have him do his schooling all in one area which I had never been able to do. I went to seven schools in seven years from fifth through eleventh. You don’t get to make and keep friends that way, but it was a heck of an experience. His dad had gone to school all twelve years in Petersburg West Virginia.
Dustin went to Puesta del Sol Grade School which was about a mile from our house. Most of the time I took him since the school system thought we were to close to qualify for a school bus. As soon as Dustin moved on to Mid School they had busses. Sometimes he would walk with his friends. I remember Anthony Perea that lived across from us and down a couple of houses. His mom, Sally, was a casual friend. There was also Wade and Andy. Dustin was in Cub Scouts with Andy and they were friends all the way through high school. Again I knew Andy’s mom casually. While in Cub Scouts, Dustin, age seven, built and painted one of the Derby race cars that all Cub Scouts build with the help of their parents. Lots of cars seem too be built completely by the parents but we only helped Dustin having him do most of the work. It wasn’t near as fancy or well made as the ones done by parent for their boys but we were thrilled then it won the Derby car race for our small school area. I think many of the parents who had built the cars for their sons were a bit shocked when Dustin’s won as you could tell by looking at it that Dustin had done the work himself. Dustin went on to compete at the Albuquerque District level but didn’t get very far. At least we had the pleasure of winning the first race. Dustin never seemed to care for the car after he didn’t get any farther with it but I have kept it for him. Maybe some day he will want it back.
Mid School or junior high as it used to be called was at Lincoln Mid School and was a couple of miles from us. Dustin rode the school bus most of the time. High school was at Cibola High School about five miles from us and actually in Albuquerque instead of Rio Rancho. While Dustin was in school Rio Rancho schools were part of the Albuquerque school system. It was in Dustin’s last year that Rio Rancho had the first year of their own school system. The Rio Rancho High School opened that year but did not except any senior kids or 12th graders that year, and Cibola didn’t really want to except the Rio Rancho seniors. Even though they had to let them go to school at Cibola they didn’t provide bus service. Dustin started driving to school as soon as he could get his drivers license. At first it was our older International Scout 11 that Lee and I had bought just months before Dustin was born. (We still have it or I should say Dustin has it where he is.) With Lee’s help, Dustin bought a 1968 Mustang that he drove during his senior year, and that he still has now. I do think that the little car was full of Rio Rancho senior going to school most morning and coming home in the afternoon.
We had the 1979 Scout and the 1970 Duster when we moved to Rio Rancho. It seemed we went through a long list of trucks while we lived there. Next was an older 1984 Chevy pickup that didn’t stay around very long before we sold it. Then Lee bought a 1987 Dodge Dakota pickup the first year the Dakotas were sold. Then I bought a 1988 Jeep Comanche pickup. With the Scout Dakota and Comanche we decided there was no need for the 1972 Duster and sold it. We have always regretted selling that little car. It was the only car we ever bought new and was a good one. Later Lee bought a 1970 Dustin, which we still have, but it was never as good as the first one. Not being satisfied with the automatic drive in the Dakota or the gas mileage it got, Lee traded it for a 1992 Dodge Dakota with a five speed in it. That one we liked and soon I bought a used 1987 Dakota and sold the Jeep Comanche. We still have both Dakota, both being good trucks that have done lots of work for us. They just haven’t been a big or been able to pull as big a trailer as we would like. In 2001 we bought a well used 1990 Dodge Ram Charger. It had the room to seat more than two people and power to pull a trailer but the gas mileage was horrible, especially at a time when the price of gas suddenly shot sky high. We still have it at this time but would like to sell it. Oddly both Dakotas and the Ram were a silver/gray in color. The Scout was starting to fade from the bright flame orange it had been when we bought it so Lee painted it gray as well.
We, also, went through several different snowmobiles during the time we lived in Rio Rancho. First were the two older one, a 1976 blue Kawasaki, and a 1973 red Rupp. As they were pretty well worn out we bought a 1983 yellow Skidoo, which is the excepted color of most Skidoos. The Skidoo never did seem to work the way it should have so Lee bought a 1996 red Yamaha Mountain Max and then a1997 black Artic Cat Cougar, followed by a 1998 black Artic Cat Jaguar. We still have all of them or we have four and Dustin has two but none have been out in the snow in several years and I doubt if any of them would actually run. It would take a lot of work to get them working again.
We decided we needed something we could use on the mountain and desert trails in summer, spring and fall like we did the snowmobiles in the winter. ATV’s seemed like the perfect answer. First we got a 1999 Artic Cat 300. Green and black are the main colors of most Artic Cat vehicles but most of their ATV’s are red. Ours are. In 2000 we got an Artic Cat 500. We have run them over many a mile of desert and mountain trails and have used the 500 as a “tractor” where we live now since that is one of the few vehicles we have never had.