God on my Shoulder Part 2: Leaving Colorado Behind (c) Nita Walker Boles

There are ways taught with nuances and without direct intention. Not that my parents would not have intended to teach me about God, because they did. But there were hundreds of lessons to learn in every day life, with reverence for life and all that was good in it. The scene that met us every day after school was the one of our father, who seemed never to be far from us, reading from the Scriptures. It was long into adulthood that I learned from my youngest brother that  he had actually arranged life that way.

"No, no," Rob heard  him talking on the phone. "I really can't meet at that time.  I have kids that get in from school, and I need to be there." Oh, so it was no accident. "I can meet with you in the evening," he suggested.
Most of his appointments were  made during the day while we were at school or during the evening when we were settled in and working on our homework. Mother was home from work by that time, so she took over from there as Daddy went out the door to meet some steel worker or ditch digger who wanted to be sure he could at least pay one day for his own burial. It was a burial policy, one that provided for the cost of a funeral, that my father sold. Poor men who worked hard did not want to become a burden, even in death, on their families.

Mother orchestrated everything to do with our extra curricular activities, including attendance at church and Girl Scouts. My sister and I walked a couple of miles to be at a choir practice when we lived in  Colorado Springs to find they  had cancelled and word had not reached us. Fortunately for us a nice brother from the ministry happened to   be there and took us back home in his car, astonished that we would go to such trouble to be there. We were learning a beautiful  hymn, "I Am Satisfied with Jesus" which included the American Sign Language version. I remember most of that song in sign language today, and sometimes think on the words, " I am satisfied with Jesus. He has done so much for me.  He has suffered to  redeem me. He has died to set me free.  I am satisfied. I am satisfied. I am satisfied with Jesus. But the question comes to me as I think of Calvary, is my Master satisfied with me?"

So you see, not all that we learned at church was full of condemnation, but raised questions of  how we might improve ourselves to be fit for Divine company. There were many, many good people and good clergymen within the church. Our time there was full of memorization of key scripture passages and of stories that likened us to people in the Bible.  In reading the Old Testament stories of children and young people who interacted directly with God the Father, it did not seem impossible for one in our place and time to experience similar things.  Yet, obedient to scripture, we did not seek "for signs".   We did, however, snuggle into the comfortable arm of the Lord, expecting each new day to bring another wonder or miracle in plain site, because, that is really how we saw it. Life was joy.

In Girl's Auxillary we memorized still more scriptures, receiving small mementos as recognition for our efforts.We continued to sing in the choir, stayed active in the youth group. It was a good life, always framed in Biblical context, with the understanding that our lives lay before us with the Lord at the helm.

We would not happily nor willingly get on the ship that took us to the deserts of New Mexico, though. We had lessons in comparison and contrast regularly in the trips we took at least twice a year there. We could endure the holiday away from home just so we got to go  home, but New Mexico, did not feel like home for us.

Our older brother, Jack had scarcely beaten cancer in the previous year, our father having spent more than we had to travel in his worry over his son, and the economy failing. Our eldest brother, Son, and our father's cousin were convinced Daddy could return to farming and support us well enough. Daddy was a hard worker and a willing and experienced farmer, but the terms would be simply sharecropping. He would be bringing his wife and family of four children ranging from 4 to 17 to support, and  had not a dime to invest. We had lost the house in Pueblo, and we would be starting over. 

So the day came when the household was packed, the beloved piano still standing in the living room for want of space on the truck.  I don't remember any of it, but I know we loaded the truck, carrying boxes we had packed with our dishes wrapped in dishtowels and other linens. Whatever furniture we had for bedrooms went, the beautiful oak dining set, our kitchen table and chairs. As we drove away I tried to look at every tree and house  for the last time. Soon my gaze fell on the river and the mountain range.

In the truck ahead of us, our father was telling our brother, David about a dream he had the previous night. That day was June 7, 1965. A few drops of rain had started to fall, and he told how he had dreamed of a flood that overspilled the banks of the Arkansas river into the downtown area of Pueblo. Remarkably, when we later unloaded our truck and set up the television, the national news carried pictures of the flood in Pueblo our father had dreamed about the previous night. Perhaps his premonition of  that disaster was an affirmation for us that rough times would not  have been avoided had we managed to stay in Colorado. For we children were openly heartbroken. 

Where we were going was not an unknown to us. We had been to the plains of New Mexico visiting our complicatedly random family for what seemed like a thousand Thanksgivings and Christmases. But then we had always had the luxury of leaving the starkness of the cactus covered sand behind.

But by the time I was 13 and able to form my own opinions about preferable vacation spots,  it was not especially enchanting to visit the Land of Enchantment.  The desert was the tumbleweed  home to countless sulfuric oil wells that provided paying jobs for younger men than our father. Doubtless they would otherwise be tilling the soil for cotton or maize, the other cash crop. There were  a few cattle, but the brittle land would not support herds in numbers to compare to those in  less arid areas across the border, in Texas. 

After the 12  hour drive from Denver, we found ourselves parked in front of a small two bedroom frame house in the middle of a field of maize outside Lovington, New Mexico.  A windmill creaked on the tower behind the  house Within a few hours we had unloaded our furniture, put away the dishes and pans, and set up beds.

Our mother, one of the most resourceful women I have ever known, declared one end of the living room a Master bedroom. By standing one dresser on top of another she created a buffer zone that separated their room from the living area. Mother used the same curtain that had partitioned my bedroom from the den area of our basement in Colorado. Strung  on a clothesline across the back end of the living room it allowed a bit of  privacy.  The two boys were in one bedroom and we girls in the other. We were comfortable enough if our parents were consigned to the least desirable space. I was 13 that summer as we arrived and would turn 14 before the year was up. My brother, David was 11. My sister, Mary, was 17. And Rob, the youngest, was 4.

We almost immediately began the planting of a garden, from which we canned every single thing not required to feed us immediately. David went to work with Daddy every day. It was not child's  play. He rode on the back of combines, dangerous work for a little boy. Anything the men did he also did to the best of his ability becoming muscled, tanned, and weary.

He later told how he witnessed the look of worried care growing on our father's face. The economics of raising a family were unknown to my brother, but he recognized the edge in our father's voice when he told his cousin that he was "sick to his stomach with worry" over how we would make it.

To buffer us from the trials around us, Mother made sure we had the chance to go to Bible School for the week when they held it.  So David had a reprieve from farm work for that time. It was a relief for us to hear familiar music and have scripture read that we recognized.

"I was glad when they said unto me 'Let us go into the House of the Lord'." We memorized more verses: "The Lord is my light and my salvation:  Whom shall I fear? the Lord is the strength of my life.Of whom shall I be afraid?"

"Make a  joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands.  Serve the Lord with gladness. Come before His presence with singing. Know ye that the Lord  He is God.  It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves. We are His people and the sheep in His pasture.  Enter into  his courts with singing and into his gates with praise. Be thankful unto Him and bless His name. For the Lord is good; His mercy is everlasting; and His truth endureth to all generations."

"Trust in the Lord with all thy heart, and lean not to thine own understanding."

These verses, though seemingly simple, would become the place we could go in our hearts. when things seemed hopeless and depressing.

That fall some of the winter clothes I had from the previous year still fit. Although Mother was the best with a sewing machine, she did not have many resources to provide us with anything new as the new school year began. David was on free lunches at school.  I continued to ask Daddy every day for lunch money. He would dig in  his pockets and come up with a little change for me and I would thank him. Unbeknown to me, my sister did not ask and was not offered money to eat on. Why David was getting free lunches and we were not I will never know. Our mother must have assumed if she had filled out some paperwork that it applied to us all. Nevertheless, Mary went to school each day with no money in her pocket.  Two very nice girls befriended her and made sure she ate every day by going back for seconds at lunch time.

To say that we hated being there would be an understatement. The culture was something we could not  understand. It was as different as Country music and Rock and Roll.  We were thinking about the Beatles, and few of our contemporaries there knew who they were.  We treasured the few friends we made who also listened to Simon & Garfunkle.  We were out of place. We wrote letters to our old pen pals in France and England and added our old friends from Colorado.  Anxious for word from "home", the reports of life in a place that was becoming increasingly irrelevant were meaningless and empty for both my sister and I.

Gradually the connections to Colorado were being shorn away. A youth hayride at church turned out to be in the back of a cotton wagon. There were bales of hay, all right, but the cage around us was covered with cotton burrs and lint. Because it was fall I  had worn my black and white hounds tooth pleated skirt and a  black cable knit sweater. Although they fit comfortably I could not wear them again because I couldn't get the lint out of them.

Our Midwest accents and mannerisms were more foreign to them  than their Southern drawls and boisterous ways were to us. Because we had grown up with those differences within our own family, we were naturally more accepting of the local kids than they were with us. They weren't going to change and it was up to us to adapt. Friendships came slowly.  My closest friend suffered from a birth defect that left her eyelids partially closed. Her father worked the fields and oilfields, and she told me, could not afford the operation needed to raise her eyelids out of the field of obstruction. Consequently she kept her head tilted slightly back to see, but self-conscious, not enough to see well. Her neck must have always been sore.  She had few other friends. Another girl, there from California, was as different from the local kids as I was, and as different from me than them. Being all different, we made a society of three.

Still, every night I prayed for the Lord to package us up and send us back home. When we crossed the highway that lead north, I imagined the straight ribbon as it traveled, gradually ascending to the plateaus and foothills and went  past the Sangre de Christo mountain range. I imagined going back to our home, our friends, our life now gone. I cried enough in the middle of the night that Mother had to have heard me.

To help clothe us, Mother had gone to work at an Anthony's department store on the square and she brought bargains she found on the sale rack now and then to stretch our wardrobes. Although it almost never rained, she brought me a matching lined raincoat and umbrella that must have been marked far below value. The raincoat served more practicably as a light jacket since all I had was a heavy winter coat, seldom needed in the fall on the plains.

One day she brought me a little gold toned necklace that had the Serenity Prayer on it.  While we were completely unfamiliar with Alcoholics Anonymous, the message in the prayer was particularly applicable to me:  'God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.  Amen.'

She offered the necklace to me without explanation. When I read the message, I felt grateful for her compassion, and for the first time stopped blaming my parents for what had seemed like a catastrophe.

That winter was the worst time I ever remember. Sometimes there were no beans to go with the cornbread our mother made.  We  had soup made from a combination of every vegetable we had canned that summer, and made more substantial with macaroni. The slimy canned squash was my favorite to hate. My brother says that to this day, he cannot stand potato soup and will not eat it.  But I loved the potato soup in comparison to the slimy vegetable soup we had to eat. At Christmas a relative brought a ham.

I don't remember much else about Christmas there, but I know that we we were packing for a move by February. Working as a sharecropper was not going to feed  us. My prayers had been answered differently than I expected.  We were moving to Lubbock, where Daddy hoped to find work once again selling insurance,  something he was always to find success with.

I was glad to be going, but it seemed as though our family was always morphing and changing, and someone was always being left behind.  My sister had attended two years of high school in Colorado and a half year in New Mexico. Mother had asked one of the aunts in Lubbock to see whether Mary could transfer her credits and graduate that year, but it seemed that there would be some problem with not having taken Texas History or something like that.

In any case, Mary stayed behind, living with our brother, Jack, and his wife, Mary Ann. Her friends continued to insure that she ate at school. I remember being there when we said goodbye to her at our brother's house. She was silent. My stomach hurt. I asked her if she was going to be OK there and she nodded her head. I never considered switching places with her because there wasn't a reason for it. I felt guilty running out on her, but she stood there, her face a studied mask of self-control,  and we left her there.  There were no tears, just an impossibly large lump in my throat.

I was now the oldest of the three of us that remained at home.  I didn't see Mary again until she came through Lubbock in the summer on her way to  live with our oldest sister, Nina, while she attended TCU in Ft. Worth.  She stoically moved forward, and it would be years before we began to talk about the hardship of that time. But between us it was understood that God was ever there, and would help us navigate through the waters ahead.

Explaining the Big Family that was Rather Small, and the Economics of it All. (c) Nita Walker Boles

When I explain that I came from a family of 10  children, my listeners usually do some kind of gasp or at least register some astonishment. Even for mid-20th Century, 10 was a large number of children. But we did not come all at once.  We seemed, as I grew up, to have a lot of aunts and uncles that fit neither directly into the batch of 9 children my mother came from, nor the 5 that my father came from.

In time we became aware that there were all kinds of layers of family around. We called my father's uncles and aunts, "Uncle" and "Aunt".  We called his brother and sister-in-laws "Uncle" and  "Aunt" as well, and his father-in-law. "Papaw Kidd". even though he was technically not our own grandfather.  We were as apt to see them as to see our mother's or father's family.

Our father's first wife, Modena, had died in her 30's from colon cancer. She left behind their two sons, Son (James Frank) and Jack. Our mother was, as I observed earlier, possibly the first Southern Baptist woman to ever get a divorce, and had two children Nina, and Doyle, to support. It was war time, and she and Daddy met while they both worked at Walker Air Force Base.  They married in Roswell, and built a little house, bringing their four children together. As they married, Son was 14, Jack 9, Nina, 6. and Doyle, 2. 

Their first baby, Alma Jean, was born in 1945 with insufficient lung surfactant. She did not live to come home from the hospital. The war ended, and so did their civilian jobs. For some reason unknown to anyone in the family, they moved to the Ozarks of Missouri.

Following close behind them were our paternal grandparents, and one of Daddy's sisters and brother-in-law. They spent several years in the Ozarks at Exeter, a bucolic piece of Eden where the very fence posts would sprout leaves if not painted to prevent it. I think the kids were all rather happy there. Nina and Doyle were enrolled in school with Walker for their last names, although their birth father would not give them up for adoption.

Mother had another baby in 1947, Betty Ann, who was born with a serious heart defect. Although it was possible to surgically correct the problem it was necessary for her to be bigger and healthier than she was to have survived an attempt at surgery.  She died at 8 months. As an adult, Doyle would be reduced to tears as he remembered that tragedy. He was 6 years older than Betty Ann.

Son was home on leave when she died. That had to have been another shock for him. As we grew up he remained rather distant from us, never really engaging. It was not until I was grown that I understood how tentative relationships must have seemed for him.

Mary Beth was born in the first month of 1949, only 4 months after Betty Ann's death. She failed to thrive, not being able to tolerate any milk or formula until they tried goat's milk. She was so fragile that one of Mother's sisters made and sent a dress to have her buried in. She was healthy and beautiful in a short time.

I was born about 3 years later. We were still on the farm when I came, and a drought had  plagued the area for a few years. To tie the farm over, our father bought a number of piglets from an individual who may have known they all had Hog Cholera. They were all dead within a short while, and Daddy lost the farm. At the same time  his sister and her family sold out, moving back to  Texas.

Mother's ex-spouse proposed she allow him to take the two children to live with him in Ft. Worth, where he had a " good job with  General Dynamics. " . Through mother's family he reported that they would have a "better life" than they could hope for under the dire circumstances they now faced. Unknown to her, that life reportedly would include caring for an invalid grandmother and some rough treatment from an unkind father. Mother must have felt defeated. Certainly when she and I had the conversation that gave me this information she expressed that she had no other choice at the time. She allowed them to go, only to have to face a judge later in a failed attempt to regain custody.

Jack was with us for a few months when we first moved to Denver from Missouri, but not long. He went on to New Mexico to finish school, living with his mother's sister and her husband, who was my father's cousin.
He was happy to be there, and once done with school, joined the Army. He was stationed at Ft. Carson, in Colorado Springs when  he began to experience medical problems that foreshadowed the ultimate battle that lay ahead for him. Despite the medical history of his mother, the Army did not focus on the possibility he could have cancer.

So, although by way of explanation I have digressed, we left the farm about 1953,  before I was old enough to have more than one or two impressions of ever living there, with just we two girls and Jack, who soon was in New Mexico. Son was in the Military, Nina and Doyle in Ft. Worth.

There was not a job waiting in Denver. Daddy had an aunt and uncle there who must have helped him get on his feet. The job as an airplane mechanic he had hoped for at Stapleton Airport went to an ex-GI, of course. Mother and Daddy both became door-to-door salesmen, selling Filter Queen vacuum cleaners, and Tupperware.  David was born in early 1954, and now our family looked like 3 small children.  After a while, I could not remember I had an older sister until I saw her at a family gathering when I was 4.

Doyle could not bear his father's house, and left, hitch-hiking to Denver. At 13 he looked quite a bit older than he was, already nearly 6 feet tall. He had mailed a letter to Mother telling her he was coming, and she was truly happy to have him home.  He played and "roughhoused' with us, but we seldom saw him because within a very short time he was working as a bell hop at a nearby hotel. We lived just blocks from the Capital. So Doyle went to school during the day, came home for a meal and then on to the hotel til late at night.

He later told us that Mother and Daddy scarcely could make a  living when we first moved to Denver. It is true that they did not prosper until the few years we lived in Pueblo, and that did not last long because of the closing of the steel mill. Their plight might have been much like that of others of their generation. The war had brought a number of people off the farm and out to work as civilians  on the bases. The majority of them had only a high school education, and were not prepared to do any certain thing in the cities. But with the advent of the G I bill and FHA for housing, vets everywhere were climbing the economic ladder to a growing middle class, and it is true that encyclopedias, vacuums, spices, and any number of other household goods would be sold door to door. But Daddy's salvation was selling life insurance.

Mother and Daddy took in a boarder, our beloved Azhar, to help us make ends meet. Doyle stayed with us until he married, rather young, about 1959. He was the last of the "big kids" to live at home. 

My first memory is of the green bead board shelf or cabinet top by the back porch water pump in Missouri.  The next is of living briefly in a basement apartment before my parents found the house on Cherokee, in  Denver. I  remember Jack, a  tall older brother just briefly living with us on Cherokee, and then he is gone. From that time I  have a steady trickle of memories, Mother coming home from the hospital with David, (I am then 25 months old then), watching David's face as he plays, his brow furrowed with deep concentration on his objective. Mary is always beautiful, her dark chestnut hair shining and curly, her beautiful smile dimpled. I think she is prettier than Shirley Temple. Then Doyle comes to live with  us sometime following our move to East 12th  Avenue.  Finally, a young, beautifully dressed woman comes and speaks  with my mother, calling her mother. I am astonished.  After she leaves, I ask,  "Mother, why did she call you Mother?"

Although I had been  standing right there when Mary Beth had that conversation with Mother about being a flower girl at Nina's wedding, I could not summon who she was from my short memory. I loved to look at the faces of my siblings. What I had processed on Mary's face as she was trying to understand that Nina had already married, and that she could not be her flower girl was something I can now recognize as resigned disappointment.

I knew about Son and Jack, because we had seen them at our grandparents in Missouri at Christmas. But Nina was now married and living with her husband, Donald in Ft. Worth and we saw her less often because it was another 12 hour drive from New Mexico on to Ft.  Worth. In years to come, if we were home at Christmas, it would be a difficult time for our mother if Nina was not able to come. The only time I ever saw her cry was when Nina could not be home for Christmas.

So, as you see, we were from a family of 10. There were not any half brothers or sisters in that family. We all belonged to each other, even the ones we couldn't see often. Neither of my parents ever referred to the children brought to the marriage by the other spouse as "step-children" . Not ever. Nina said that after they left the farm in Missouri, they were heartbroken to have the last name they were born with once again. In Missouri it had worked, but when they moved in with their natural father it was not the same.

Both Nina and Doyle called our father "Daddy".  Doyle did see his natural father occasionally in years to come. Nina did not. But Son and Jack called our mother, "Ann". Of course that would have been natural as well.

For both sets of kids, there were periods of happiness and delight, followed by sometimes shattering disappointment. In the end, we collected one another up and made sure each  other were OK and forged on.