mamasidd

Beatle Boots

It was Saturday, our go to town day. Mama went into Anthony’s with a list: jeans and lace-up boots for my school age brothers, plaid shirts and socks for my father, white blouses and anklets for me, and new underwear for all six of us. She told me to take my youngest brother, then six, to the dime store. His birthday cash rattled in his pocket as we moseyed down the sidewalk. He said he wanted to buy a model airplane, his first. “I’m big enough now,” he said.

Chewning’s Shoe store was on the way, and Jimbo stopped to look at the treasure chest in the window. Mr. Chewning let kids pick a toy from the chest. Our parents usually shopped at a department store. Chewning’s was reserved for special occasions or baby shoes. My youngest brother was no longer a baby, but he eyed the toys just the same.

I caught my breath. In the corner, on the highest display, rested a pair of ankle boots, the same ones featured in Chewning’s ad in Sunday’s Roswell Daily Record. Nineteen ninety-five. Ladies sizes 5-12. They were just like the ones some of the girls on American Bandstand wore. A patchwork of multicolored suede: eggplant, olive, mustard, cranberry, and tiny squares of navy, all pieced together with zigzag stitching, finished with black leather laces and one inch stacked heels. Beatle boots.

The year was 1966, and I was in the sixth grade. Puberty had just struck, delivering incredible growth spurts, the appearance of pimples, a training bra and various other female paraphernalia. I went from fifty to eighty pounds in an instant, was nearly five feet tall, and ready, I thought, to move on to some footwear more adult than my twice-yearly, alternating between black-and-white or brown-and-white, or if one of my grandmothers took me to Chewning’s, the occasional Sunday-best black velvet pair of lace-up Oxfords.

At school I endured comments about my outdated shoes. Saddle Oxfords were heavy and had slick leather bottoms. They slowed me down on the track. I couldn’t run around the bases on the softball field without slipping before it was time to slide. The kids teased me every time I fell.

Mama said they were practical because I could wear them with both dresses and jeans. Grandma said tennis shoes were bad for my feet. What did I care about practical or healthy? All I wanted was to beat Betty in the 50 yard dash, and maybe, just maybe, get Billy, the new boy in our class to notice me.

Most of my girlfriends had big sisters or brothers who went to high school. They gottheir older siblings’ fashionable hand me downs. They wore Keds so stained that they coated them with liquid white shoe polish. White Keds went with everything, too, I told my mother. Why couldn’t I have some? When one of my friends started wearing a pair of lime green sneakers to school instead of black velvet oxfords, and Billy sat with her on the bus, I tried to hide my two-toned Oxfords under the seat.

Those suede boots would elevate my status. Nobody at East Grand Plains School had a pair, and I hadn’t seen any of the teenagers on the bus wearing them. The girls would be jealous, and maybe a boy would sit by me. No more saddle Oxfords. No more teasing.

I found last Easter’s black patent Mary Janes in the back of my closet. Too small. I tried on my cowboy boots. The smelled like barnyard. I dreamed about the Beatle boots and how I would look.

I started a full-court press, begging Mama and both my grandmothers. I had to have those boots. I cut out pictures from Seventeen magazines, scoured the Sears catalog, and emphatically told Mama that I was no longer going to wear ugly shoes. She told me to do my chores.

My aunt came to visit and gave me a pair of her old Keds. I was in heaven. I got out the white shoe polish. The sneakers were okay, but my toes got cold when I rode my bicycle and when I had to put the sheep in the barn after school. They would, though, be wonderful for basketball. I wouldn’t have to play in my socks. I polished the brown and white oxfords, put new laces in them, and wore them to school, carrying the Keds in my bag. I tried to ignore the teasing.

A few months later, I went into Chewning’s with my grandmother. Grandma had bunions. She tried on pair after pair of shoes before she found one that would fit. Then she asked Mr. Chewning to measure my feet. He kept a box of index cards on which he recorded each child’s shoe size and the date of purchase of every pair of shoes. “Six and a half,” he said, marking my card. “Ladies size.”

Grandma pursed her lips, reached into her purse, pulled out a square of newspaper, and handed it to him. As he unfolded it, I recognized the ad for the Beatle boots.

“They’re what all the girls like,” he said.

She looked down at my scuffed Oxfords.

Mr. Chewning disappeared behind the red brocade curtain into his library of shoes. I paced. It felt like forever before he returned with a box under his arm.

“Young lady, I have your size in that shoe. Would you care to use a stocking?”

My grandmother reached into her purse, this time withdrawing a pair of nylons. She rolled one and showed me how to put it on. I slipped my foot into the ladies size six-and-a- half patchwork suede lace-up Beatles boot with a one-inch heel. Laced up, I gazed in the mirror. What would the kids on the bus say tomorrow? I beamed.

“Well, I declare.”

“May I wear them home?”

“Yes, but don’t wear them to the barn.”

My brother, Ernie and I loved going to work with our father. He farmed my great grandmother’s 160 acres in southeastern New Mexico. It was fifteen years before my folks purchased it from her. We lived in town, eight miles away, and Daddy commuted in his green 1958 Ford pickup. Most days he left before we got up, and came home dead tired. Covered in powdery field dust, his blue eyes were sometimes the only recognizable detail of his face. If we were already asleep, he’d defy Mama’s decree to let us sleep, come into our rooms, and tickle us awake for a pillow fight. I think Mama secretly enjoyed our gleeful roughhousing, but tried not to smile.

Summertime meant twenty-four seven on the farm. Our father ran the irrigation pumps day and night, setting aluminum siphon tubes into ditches and swishing them to suck water, which poured into furrows of cotton and grain. The alfalfa fields begged us to romp through their purple flowers chasing yellow butterflies. Daddy said no, it would tromp the stems, and he couldn’t mow a packed down field.

He took us with him, “to help,” he said.  We weren’t much help, but we loved to explore. A massive weeping willow on the reservoir banks sheltered minnows under its roots.  Grandma gave us red metal coffee cans. We fashioned nets from her old cotton stockings and baling wire.

Years before Daddy was born, my great grandparents had an apple orchard. They kept bees for pollination. They sold honey, and Grandpa packed wooden crates with apples and sent them off on the train to St. Louis. One winter in the early 1930’s, the freeze came early and hard, killing all the trees and bees.

The honey house was a long, low adobe structure behind Grandma’s house. My brother and I loved to poke through the rusting comb separator and lift the lids of abandoned hives.  There was a cider press and apple crates:  Pecos Valley’s Finest, Ernest Nelson Farm. Various scythes and even a hand bellows for smoking bees hung from nails along the wall.  At the end of the building, there was one tiny room with a cot covered in folded-up cotton sacks. A scale hung from the rafters. During cotton picking season, Daddy let me write the weights down in a ledger book when each man heaved a bulging canvas sack onto his shoulder and hooked the strap into the scale hook. I loved the smell of cotton.

My father said this little room was where his great grandfather slept.  He had been a soldier in the Civil War, and we even found a round metal button on the floor, CSA. Daddy said that meant he fought for the South.  But I didn’t know about the Civil War then, and neither did Ernie, because he was only five.

On the low rafters, birds made nests where parts of the roof were missing, and little white papery wasp nests stuck to the adobe bricks. One of us tugged an apple crate, and climbed up.   We watched as gray squiggly larvae moved inside the translucent cells. Ernie grabbed a rake and I got a pitch fork.  Swap, swap.  The implements were heavy, and the nests high above. I can’t remember who did it, but somehow a nest hit the floor.

Swarms of angry wasps covered heads and faces, arms and necks.  Grandma heard our screams from the clothesline in the back yard.  Her apron flapped as she tried to beat the stinging whirring mass off.  She pulled us from the room, scolding and urging us forward, out into the sunlight. There she tossed us headlong into the muddy water of the irrigation ditch which bordered her yard.  In she came, all five feet of her, shoes and all, still beating at the wasps with her flour sack apron. Once in the water, the buzzing swarm disappeared. Grandma scooped up handfuls of mud and poulticed our swollen faces.  I don’t know if this was one of her Cherokee cures or just her instinctive move to cool the fire of the wasp stings. “Keep this on.  Let it dry.  It draws the poison out.”

We howled in pain. Ernie’s eyes were nearly closed by the stings.  His summer crew cut left his scalp without hair to protect it, and the awful bumps made him almost unrecognizable.  Because I was the fair one, Grandma always made me wear a hat, and this day, instead of tossing it aside, it  had remained on my nearly white pixie cut.  The few stings on my face didn’t begin to compete with my always-peeling sunburnt nose.

As Grandma pulled stingers and tried to shush our cries, she kept up a chant, “Lands sakes, lands sakes, what made you do such a thing?”

Table Talk

Our kitchen table. Solid oak. Thick carved legs. Too heavy to scoot around. So heavy it takes two men at each end to lift it. When I clean it, I can feel dips and divots where the top has been sanded down. Which generation carved initials with a new pocket knife? Which ever-so-great forgot to use a pad under her tracing wheel? The varnish is peeling, and the shims underneath are so dry it requires the surgical precision of my ophthalmologist husband to keep the expansion mechanism on track. We leave one leaf in just in case it quits working. I’ve scheduled the cabinet maker. Before we move to a new house, our old oaken friend will get a facelift. Better it than me.

How many reincarnations has it actually undergone? It’s our Jewish, Presbyterian, Buddhist table. Jewish for me, Presbyterian for Grandma, and Buddhist for all of the thoughts and stories it’s storing in those fat sturdy legs.

That’s because it was always at one ranch house or another- when I was a child, and when Mama was a child, and even when my grandfather and great-grandfather were children. It will soon accompany us, for the third time, to our new house. I have three tables, from three women. I have three grown children. I wonder which child will choose which table.

When all three leaves are in, it seats eighteen. That’s a good thing. It was also a good thing a hundred and fifty and maybe more years ago. My great-great had, over the course of forty years of fatherhood, sired twenty children. My grandfather’s uncles were younger that he.

It arrived in our valley in 1879 in a wagon train that brought the Corn family to New Mexico from Kerville, Texas. Pat Garrett and his men made the adobes and hauled the lumber for the new home. Garrett wasn’t always a sheriff.

Years ago, on a raucous weekend at El Farol, I met Lou Diamond Phillips and Emilio Estevez. They were in Santa Fe filming Young Guns. Phillips had just fallen from a horse doing his own stunts, and his arm was in a sling. Estevez sat at the next table. We struck up a conversation about the Pecos Valley, the range wars, and if he thought he knew enough about Sheriff Garrett to play Billy. He shrugged. I asked, “What did he do before he was a lawman and killed The Kid?”

Calmly, and without hesitation, he answered, “He had a wagon business.”

I replied. “I’ll watch the movie, and you are now an honorary New Mexican.”

I imagine that my great-great grandfather and Garret had coffee at my table. My ancestor’s new teenage bride might have sloshed coffee on his leather chaps from the black enamel pot. The men talked about the river, the new gristmill being built nearby, and the price the U.S. Army was paying for the cattle they would drive to Ft. Sumner to feed the Native Americans interred at Bosque Redondo.

The kitchen would have been cool and dimly lit. The windows were small and the walls were thick. I can hear a dozen young cowboys, all of them brothers, wash at the pump outside the door, joking, shoving each other, and ducking their tallness to avoid the low doorframe. Spurs jangle and scrape, sometimes marring the table legs in a cog-wheel pattern. I run my hands along those punched-out patterns, and smell the horse and sweat along with the salt pork the blonde and lovely Julia has browned to add to the bottomless pot of frijoles on the wood stove.

Its next move was also by wagon, to the new house on the high plains further north. Eden Valley, they called it. The wood floor must have been reinforced to hold the table and all the mismatched high-backed chairs. The menfolk were cattlemen, not carpenters, and when a chair slat broke they most likely repaired it with bailing wire and horseshoe nails. The table collected layers of kitchen grease in the intricate geometric carvings along its edge. Sand filtered in through the cracks in the walls. Pat Garrett was off hunting outlaws by then.

With so many children, the family built a schoolhouse and hired a young schoolteacher. She arrived in a stagecoach from Uvalde. Tall and blonde, articulate and strict, she boarded with the Corns. How did my great-grandfather win her hand? Was there much competition among all those wild cowboy brothers? The teacher got the table as a wedding present.

She was fastidious. Her crisp white blouses, fastened at the neck with her grandmother’s cameo brooch, and the scrubbed and combed bevy of six little boys in the tintype photos attest to that. My grandfather and his brothers returned from sheep camp and roundups to delicious and hearty meals. The oak table witnessed statehood when my grandfather was five years old.

My grandparents married in 1928. The table was their wedding present. Grandma scrubbed and smoothed the wood with a steel brush and sandpaper. A fresh coat of varnish made it look new in the sparsely furnished ranch kitchen. She sat there, reading and smoking, while the beans cooked and a sponge cake, light as air, baked. Though a newlywed, she was no stranger to cooking for a small army of extended family. She was one of eleven children.

They bought a ranch, and the table moved west a few miles, where it resided on the sod floor of a low-slung house made from the flat limestone rocks that covered the hillsides. Some of the stones were dotted with fossilized clams and trilobites, evidence that there had once been an ocean where my grandparents now prayed daily for rain to quench the thirsty sections on which they subsisted. Grandma painted the table yellow, a bright touch in the dark house. She sewed matching gingham curtains for the two lopsided windows at each end. My mother sat on a thick wooden chopping block placed in a yellow chair as Grandma taught her to write her A-B-C’s.

They built a bigger house next door. My grandmother painted the table red and sewed curtains with little Mexican hats along the hems. Mama sat on the side next to the ice box, and her baby brother played in his high chair. Grandpa hung his hat on the hook by the back door, and swore every time he banged his shin on the crossbar underneath as he sat down. I wonder if he did that when he was a boy. Did fathers always have to sit at the head of the table? Grandpa’s solution was a saw. He scraped his chair back, and interrupted Grandma’s roasted lamb dinner to cut the damned thing off. The legs were a little crooked after that, but like Grandpa, strong and steady.

The ranch was twenty-six miles from town. No electricity except from a gasoline generator that ran only for the radio after supper, and no telephone except a hand-cranked system that the ranchers rigged themselves. They strung wire for miles and miles on the tops of cedar fence posts so they could communicate with each other. The nearest neighbor was eight or ten miles away, reachable only by rutted un-graded tracks or horseback.

About a dozen ranch wives started the Long Distance Club. They would gather a few times a year, have a meal, admire each other’s home-decorated kitchens, do a little sewing project together, and enjoy having another live woman to talk to. My grandmother was a genius at turning nothing into something. She embroidered delicate flowers on feed sack towels; stenciled colorful designs onto walls and canisters. Burlap wool sacks, stitched with bright colored yarn, became living room curtains. No stick of furniture escaped her paint brush, especially the oak table. When Grandma hosted the Long Distance Club, she painted the table navy blue.

I was a child when my grandmother bought a “new” table. This one was round and smooth. Oil-based enamel from the color-of-the-latest-Ladies’ Home Journal had gone out of fashion. The blue table was hauled to the second ranch house at Brown Lake. No one lived in the house, but at roundup time, the brothers and cousins and their hands gathered there for a few days of work and tall tales. My grandmother pulled the table out to its majestic length, threw on an oilcloth printed with little flowers, I set at least a dozen places with chipped plates and mis-matched cutlery, filled jelly glasses with rainwater ice and gallons of brewed tea. Lamb roast and all the trimmings were in the oven by daybreak, and Grandma unfolded her bread cloth. It was time to make rolls. She dusted the cloth with flour, scalded milk, and performed magic. Her rolls are a family legend. Each one of us has her recipe, but I know she held something back. We’ve never been able to duplicate the light, fragrant buns that kept coming to the table. I think people came to help at my grandparents’ work days because they wanted Grandma’s cooking.

They sold the ranches to my uncle and his wife. The table moved to town, where, once again, my grandmother gave it yet another reincarnation. Weeks of paint remover, sand paper, brought the table to its original color. The oak grain was beautiful. Then in her seventies, my grandmother had developed painful distorting arthritis in her hands. She used awls and nutpicks to scrape and dig at the many layers of red, yellow and blue paint. Did I see a little green spot when I waxed the table last month? She brushed on a coat or two of varnish, and the top shone. Below, the carved legs still bore the evidence of their multiple paint colors.

In 1984, my husband finished his medical training, and we moved our family to Roswell. My elated grandparents brought us the ranch table as a housewarming gift. Ourchildren have added their scratches and drops of paint to its surface. We have enjoyed thirty Thanksgiving dinners and birthday parties, many of them with four generations seated around it. There’s a high chair in the nearby corner; we have a grandchild. He’s the seventh generation to eat at the table since 1879. How many came before? How many yet to come?

I think I’ll just sand the top, add a new coat or polyurethane, and keep the many-colored legs just the way they are. The next generation can add its own touch of color.

     When I was a child, books were my refuge.  I had three little brothers, lived on a farm that demanded my parents’ time 24/7, and there was no peace or privacy for most of those years.  If I had a few minutes away from chores, or a few hours, some of those huddled under the covers with a flashlight, I read.  Books took me to faraway places where nobody broke my toys or told me I was ugly.  The children in those books had adventures and didn’t have to gather the eggs or pull weeds, or if they did, it seemed like fun.

         “Put that damn book down and get busy.  Go help your mother,” my father would say if he caught me reading my favorite Nancy Drew mysteries.  I’d do what I was told, but dreamed the whole time I was feeding the chickens or watching a little brother of what would happen in the next chapter.

            On Saturdays, Mama dropped me at the Carnegie Library in Roswell, New Mexico, while she did the weekly grocery shopping or took some laundry to be dried in my grandmother’s dryer.  I know now that Mama mostly wanted to see her parents, who lived on a ranch, and only came to stay in their “town” house every few weeks.  The automated dryer was also a labor saver, and Mama, with four kids and a farmer husband, had mountains of laundry and about two miles of clothesline. She’d visit my grandparents while her clothes dried, hit Furr’s like a whirlwind across a cotton field, fill the 57 Oldsmobile’s trunk with comestibles, and swing by the library to pick me up.  All of this happened between 9AM and eleven.  She then drove the ten miles home and got a hot meal ready for Daddy and the boys by noon.

            In those two hours, I amassed a pile of books to hopefully tide me over until the next Saturday.  By fourth grade, Mama had to give Mrs. Langford, the children’s librarian, written permission for me to check out books from the grownup library upstairs.  I was in heaven.  I discovered Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and later, Ian Fleming, Margaret Mitchell, and the New York Times Bestseller List.  Mama and I, and even my grandmother, who subscribed to Book of the Month, shared books and discussed them. I discovered new worlds.

            Last week, in our local paper, the headline read, “Historic Library on the Auction Block. The Carnegie Library in Roswell, New Mexico, has been vacant for over thirty years.  Its white limestone walls and terra cotta tile steps still look inviting when I pass the corner of Third Street and Richardson Avenue.  Around the corner the door which led to the Children’s Library looks the same as it did fifty years ago.  Has it really been fifty years? 

             Instantly, I can smell the familiar odor of Mrs. Langford’s card file and feel the worn-soft  Babar books, pages turned by hundreds of little sticky fingers.  I close my eyes, and  see a reading circle and hear her read to us at story time.  The squeak of the dumbwaiter which carried books up and down, and the scuffing of shoes under the tables in the “quiet area,” where I studied as a high-schooler and, later, as a college student.  I am so moved, so hurt, so angry.  My safe place, the magical world, my most favorite childhood haunt, might be destroyed. 

            “Too far gone, too expensive to restore, not enough parking,” the quotes in the paper read.  They saved a gas station from the 40’s from being demolished…someone even donated $40K.  But the Carnegie Library, symbol of American hope, seeded by a Scottish immigrant who believed in the value of learning and books for everyone?  What is wrong with this picture?

             I feel the lump in my throat, and have to blink back tears.  My grandmother went door to door collecting money to help build that refuge, that haven of knowledge, adventure, and joy.  When the town outgrew the old building, others took up the cause and raised funds for our present library.  I spent the afternoon there, just today, re-reading Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, remembering the first time I met Scout and Atticus. 

            I will always love books and libraries, and I will forever be grateful for that lovely white icon at the corner of Third and Richardson.  Roswell, I love you, but I fail to see the value of a gas station over a library.  What would Mrs. Langford think?

A few days ago, my daughter and son-in-law sent an amazing video clip of my six-month old grandson’s first exposure to a unique desert creature called child of the earth. Little O watched intently as the strange-looking insect circled the jar in which it had been captured. How would he describe what he was seeing for the first time?

One of the first directives a new writer is given is to show the reader through descriptive language, not tell. Let the reader create his or her own vision through the words of the writer. Watching an infant’s eyes widen at the wonder of an unusual, though yet for him to know, rarely seen insect made quite an impression on me. My grandson never took his eyes off it. He couldn’t touch it or, like most infants, explore it with his mouth. What if my readers were like O, but in this instance, reading for the first time about an unusual member of the animal kingdom?

It glistened, gel-covered, amber, like wet cellophane. A large, globular head, with protruding black eyes slowly moved back and forth in an arc, testing the boundaries of a quart Mason jar. Its head was attached to a long larval body by a stalk, making it look like a dashboard ornament, though its movements were much more controlled than the hula girl my husband used to have in his car. Alternating bands of black and white ectoskeleton gleamed as if aspic covered its body and tail. The powerful back legs must be taken from a grasshopper. I wonder if this oddity of nature can hop as well as crawl. Two smaller appendages attach to the proximal body, and the claws look amphibious. Can this so-called child of the earth climb walls? Though only an inch and a-half long, its strangeness gives it a science fiction monster quality. It is so ugly, I wonder if its physical characteristics alone have kept it from extinction.

Child of the Earth, or Jerusalem cricket, is neither a child, nor a cricket, and it is certainly not from Jerusalem. Its proper and scientific name is Stenopelmatus. It’s found in the desert west, can make a drumming noise when mating, and a stink when provoked. Read all about it. I can’t wait for my grandson to walk the desert with me. Who knows what we’ll find to describe. Read more…

World leaders should get to know my mother.  She should run the UN, the USA, and probably the world.  She can get almost anyone to do anything and she can make almost anyone get along with anyone else.  She’s a born leader, and the most successful diplomat I’ve ever encountered.

My mother had four children by the time she was twenty-six.  My daddy was a tenant farmer who worked long hours, and was too tired and too disinterested to pay much attention to what went on in the situation room at home.  When war broke out between or among the three oldest of us, she had a battle plan ready.

For verbal squabbles, which usually arose over the daily chore list, she used sewing thread.  Yes, sewing thread.  I preferred the shiny turquoise spool, while Ernie liked army green.  Ken always favored red.  If we couldn’t resolve the issue of whose turn it was to empty the trash or feed the chickens, Mama would calmly direct the loudest protester to bring the thread.  She eyeballed. a length, usually about a yard, snapped it off with her teeth, and said, ‘Hands out.”  One kid’s left hand, though not mine; I’m left-handed, and a brother’s right hand.  She tied one end of thread to each child’s outstretched wrist.

“Ok, now empty the trash.  Together.  If you break the thread, you get spanked,” she said.

It’s amazing what two children can accomplish when they’re tied together and petrified of the belt that hung in plain view, practically jumping off the hook, ready to smack our bare behinds.

What if my mother could get the Speakers, theMajority leaders, and the Senators from each party, tie their wrists together and threaten them with something scary, like losing a pay raise or a pension if they didn’t get a budget ready by a certain time.  I’m willing to bet Mama would get results, and that the  thread-linked individuals would eventually cooperate towards a common goal.  Should I write a letter to the President?

When it comes to fistfights, rock throwing or bullying within the family, Mama had a stockpile of secret weapons.  Her favorites were the empty cardboard tubes that wrapping paper came on.  My brothers were wiry and strong.  I wasn’t.  If I needed to duke it out, usually with Ernie, my mother would hand us each a Hallmark tube, send us to the back yard in full view of her kitchen window, and go at each other like  medieval knights.  The harder we hit, the more battered the tubes became.  I swung for his head, the tube disintegrated, and we collapsed onto the lawn, laughing so hard we forgot why we were angry.  I’d call that expert foreign relations.  War was averted.

Rolled up newspapers and boxing gloves were reserved for more serious disagreements, but even then, the bouts in Mama’s backyard ring usually dissolved into laughter.

Today, my mother is in her late seventies, still wise, still very much a diplomat, and still in posession of the best sense of right and wrong I’ve ever seen.  My brotthers and I are in our fifties, and we’re fast friends.

Mama, you deserve the Nobel Peace Prize.

I’ve been struggling with a story, trying to decide how I’ll tell it, and from which point of view.  It started out with three….all at the same time. Maybe that’s because I know all three main characters, and what they thought or did at the time the events in my story occurred.  Or maybe it’s because I have three favorite views.

When I was a child, I loved the view from my bedroom window.  I drove to my childhood home today, to the farm where my great-great grandparents homesteaded, my great grandparents toiled , and where my father  purchased and operated until he became  disenchanted and disengaged from the land , from us, and from himself.  I wanted an often- missed glimpse of what I still call “home.”  That view never fails me.

Daddy thought everyone should get up when he did.  He’d rush down the hall before daylight, switching on the overhead 100-watt bulbs, yelling for us all to get up, get our chores done, and get on the bus.  I hate waking up like that, and promised myself that I would never rudely awaken anyone unless it was an emergency.   There was one good part of those hectic mornings…the sun coming up over the Caprock.  The white gypsum and red clay which make up the geological shelf of the western edge of the Llano Estacado and underneath, the Permian Basin, turn into the world’s biggest fire opal at dawn.  Mica, quartz crystals and the Pecos River reflect off the sunrise, painting a landscape of purple, silver, apricot and the purest of pinks.  It’s a special gift to an early riser looking eastward from the farmland in our valley.  A buffering from my father.

There is a hill on what was once my maternal grandparents’ ranch where one can see  in panorama, the Caprock, El Capitan peak, and the entire Sierra Blanca range.  Standing there, drinking in sunshine, the vastness, and the rugged peaks, gives me a sense of how small I am.  Buzzards circle overhead, little black ants in the sky that is, from my viewpoint,  a perfect dome, a sort of bell jar.  No clouds, no sounds, no water.  Just me and whatever force is holding me here.  I wish I could take a 360-degree photo, but  I am reluctant to share.

US 285 north of Santa Fe offers a narrow point of view until the dynamited slices of the hills the road travels through widen, opening into the Pojoaque Valley and beyond.  This is perhaps the most freeing from the ordinary I have without leaving New Mexico.  Wide mesas, chewed out of rock by some mythological god, into the most fantastical shapes span the horizon. Camel Rock, and beyond that, multiple wind-formed chimneys and spires of sandstone, only to be bested by the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, dusted in snow.  Open the car window.  Listen to the wind.  I can feel the spirits of the ones who came before.  Piñon smoke and purple sage are my favorite perfumes.  I can see forever.  I feel spiritual. I become forever.

Whatever point of view I choose for the story of Lillian and her garden, I have three examples.  Maybe they’re not the ones found in my writing manuals, but if I think about the three physical views and how they provide me with different perspectives in my own thought process, I’m sure to find the right literary point for Lillian and her fellow characters.

I found a box of my grandmother’s things in the garage.  She saved everything in cigar boxes and coffee cans.  That’s because they fit into the big pockets she sewed onto all of her blouses.  She favored browns and yellows, especially if they were together on the same fabric, and plaid.  Whenever Bertha, I called her by her first name, found a pattern she liked, she sewed a week’s worth of blouses.  She liked the yard goods at Duckwalls.  The blouses had to have pockets to carry her cigarettes. lighter, and Kleenex in one, and in the other, a guidebook, little squares of newspaper, a pair of pliers or a rock hammer, and a coffee can.  She collected.  And she re-used buttons.  She had a cigar box full of antique buttons.  Bertha’s blouses were sewn from dime store cloth, a Vogue pattern design, and heirloom buttons.  When she put one on and started to fill her pockets, I ran for the cloth bag she’d sewn for me, and my hat.  It was a collecting day.

The cigar box smelled like Bertha.  Winstons, Pond’s cold cream, and the ranch.  Inside were several tiny fosillized seashells, each wrapped in its own square of newspaper.  The Roswell Daily Record, February 10, 1966.  I  imagined that it had been a cold, windy day.  My grandmother liked to hunt fossils in the winter, because it wasn’t snaky in and among the limestone and shale ledges down in the draw where she’d spotted these little treasures.

I rummaged through my bookshelves for her guidebooks.  She’d given them to me when her arthritis kept her from her nature walks over the hills and creeks, and pastures that made up the Rock House and Brown Lake ranches.  Ranching was my grandparents’ life, livelihood, and passion for more that sixty years.  When someone asked my grandfather if he had a hobby, he said ranching.

Bertha studied those guidebooks, and she walked.  She might take the same walk every day for a week, and would see something new every day.    Fossils on Monday, tiny cacti with microscopic spines and fuschia blossoms smaller than a Q-tip on Tuesday;  Wednesday she carried the bird book, pointed out meadow larks, a Harris’s hawk, and a killdeer’s nest.  Rocks on Thursday, and if we were lucky, we might see a piece of banded agate, evidence of past visitors to this terrain.  Fridays in the spring found us examining the lavender clusters of of wild verbenea, which always made my grandfather sneeze; mesquite flowers, and the bright red devil’s head cactus blossom.  Bertha circled each find.  Don’t pick them, she’d say.  We want to see them again next year.

My grandmother had to drop out of high school during the Depression to help her family.  She deeply regretted not going to college.  The guidebooks were her textbooks, and the ranch was her laboratory.  Bertha was a born naturalist. Her keen sense of observation, her love of nature, and her desire to keep learning have had a lasting effect on all of us, including the great grandchildren who walked with her in the garden or across the hills.

I use guidebooks for travel and for writing, for language and for gardening, but my most treasured reference books are the pocket field guides my grandmother carried in her pocket.

Finding the right words is akin to gathering eggs.  I grew up on a farm and ranch, and have always raised chickens.

Free-range hens lay their eggs just about anywhere.  Bucket in hand, I climbed up haystacks, under farm equipment, and behind the feed barrels.  If I was lucky, I collected an egg for every hen.  Sometimes, though, one or more eluded my search.  Just like words.  How to phrase a sentence with just enough words, but not too many?  What if I didn’t find enough eggs for my family’s breakfast or Mama’s sponge cake?

Reaching under a hen in her nest is risky.  She might peck.  If she is a setting hen, there’s a pretty good chance that one day when you gently slide your hand under her fluff, you’ll feel the tiny warm fuzziness of baby chicks.  Luck.  Maybe I’ll get a list sentence, in which every word fits.  A nest-full of beautiful words.

It’s best to carry a flashlight into the hen house.  Sometimes bull snakes, or even worse-rattlers, slither in to enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet of multicolored orbs.  I hate touching reptiles.  A dictionary is a kind of literary lamp.  It can’t prevent every writing disaster, but it can shed a light.

Carrying a pail of warm brown, white, and green eggs into the house at sundown on a chilly January day is my idea of  perfection.  Feeling their smoothness, I placed each one into its hollow of a gray cardboard crate.  A perfect dozen.  They fit, just like well-written sentences on a page.

You can’t forget to close the gate.  The hens might get out, or a fox might get in.

The same goes for writing.  Too many words, and your thoughts just run away.