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.
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