Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
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The surprises just kept coming. When I moved in with Peter a few years back, I brought my clothes, a few books, and some artwork. I rented out my house, gave away my furniture, and everything else was consigned to “things I’ll deal with later,” a pile which — mysteriously — did not shrink with time. These stacked plastic boxes were still in my barn, still waiting for me, long after I’d forgotten what was in them or cared. But I am going to put the property up for sale and it was time for a reckoning with the barn. It to...
Nobody was using the old wren house. My grandfather built it. Grandpa started building birdhouses when he retired from milking cows and his second oldest son took over. That son, my mother’s brother, is now 87 and retired 20 years ago. It’s a pretty old birdhouse. “My dad never built fancy birdhouses,” my mother explained. Grandpa put on a tarpaper roof and, if you needed to clean it out, you had to unscrew the back. But they were sweet little birdhouses, painted bright blue with a little perch outside the round door. I...
I’ve been having my husband, Peter, cut my hair. I’m not sure I would recommend this to everyone, but I have almost no hair. Actually, I have the usual number of hairs, but they are so fine that a hair that falls from my head into the sink is invisible to the naked eye. Peter cuts his own hair and kept insisting he could cut mine. I was waiting weeks to get an appointment with a stylist and, when I finally got in, pay an extraordinary amount per milligram of hair cut. The haircut itself was something like a mime act. Nei...
This is my birthday month. Those of you with summer birthdays know it’s a little different. In the middle of March, everyone says, “Wow! A birthday party!” You bring treats to school and everyone is happy for an excuse to celebrate. It’s different for the summer kids. Everyone is already busy with vacations and visitors and then, somewhere in the middle of all that, someone says, “Oh! It’s Carrie’s birthday, isn’t it?” My birthday was particularly unreliable because it fell when the plant where my father worked as an engi...
My parents recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary and I stood in front of the greeting card rack for a long time. Whenever I try to buy a card for my mom or dad, I have a heck of a hard time. I almost bought a “blank inside” card because there wasn’t anything that even came close to telling them what I was thinking on the occasion of this milestone anniversary. My parents have the kind of marriage that used to intimidate me. Other kids’ parents fought. Mine never did. Other kids would play one parent off the oth...
I started this column one year ago. I am more than a little superstitious when it comes to numbers. When I wrote the first draft of my memoir, “Blue Yarn,” I had an even number of chapters in all three sections. This was probably tidier than necessary, but maybe not terribly unusual. But then I made sure that every chapter had exactly 5,000 words. This pleased me to no end — even as I realized my mania for symmetry was tipping over the edge. When my agent sent notes to me, one of her comments was, “Chapter Eleven is very re...
I’ve got a good friend, Ayo, who told me, “Don’t use your head to break a coconut.” As I wrote about in my memoir, Blue Yarn, I lived in Lagos, Nigeria, for almost four years, and I met Ayo there. Ayo is a smart woman and a voracious reader and she is full of good advice. Ayo is what they describe in Nigeria as “a serious person.” A serious person in Nigeria is one you can trust, someone who can be relied upon. The advice Ayo generally gives, however, annoys me because it challenges the way I think. “Have you considered going...
Spring came late and so, appropriately, did the annual deep cleaning of the refrigerator. A lot of stuff gets tucked into the refrigerator over the course of the winter. Obsolete condiments band together and take refuge deep in the corners. A thuggish-looking jar of jam wearing a cap of mold sidles up to an empty bottle of horseradish sauce and they both evade detection by skulking behind an oversized bag of sun-dried tomatoes. A stray stalk of celery becomes separated from the pack and is left alone to mummify. Unnoticed...
My husband, Peter, decided to make friends with a raven. We have a lot of ravens around our house. Ravens are smart birds and Peter did some research on them. They mate for life and can live to be 17 years old in the wild. They learn to recognize people and will grow less afraid once they know someone. So, Peter decided he was going to leave small treats on the birdbath every day and let some raven couple get to know him. At approximately the same time as Peter hatched his plan, we decided to replace one of our two pub chairs...
I get anxious, as I might have mentioned. While I don’t think it’s anything requiring medication, fortunately, I became aware at middle-age that I have always had a sort of “hum” of anxiety going on in the background. I usually only notice it when it stops — like when the refrigerator has been running nonstop and you only notice when it falls silent. Anxiety has not always been my enemy. I am almost never late. I never miss a deadline. I lie in bed and obsess about everything I’ve written to everyone so I don’t make a lot of...
The truth is, I don’t actually have 40 friends in my immediate community. I only recently moved to town when I married Peter. So, I just went around town and invited every person I recognized and, somehow, ended up inviting 40 people to my patio on a recent Monday evening to celebrate the release of my book. I invited all the neighbors, and a guy I met on the trail, some writers, and a librarian, and a woman I occasionally see walking her dog — sometimes with her friend, Georgina. The dog-walking woman was recently div...
As long-time readers of this column know, I do not delve into politics or current events. You might think this comes from a desire to find common ground with all my readers. You might think I am trying to bridge the divide in a time when there aren’t enough opportunities to examine the myriad of things we have in common. Or you might simply think I am a coward who wishes to avoid controversy. You would all be wrong. I am simply too ill-informed to say anything intelligent about current events, certainly anything that h...
My husband, Peter, and I just spent a couple of days staying with our scientist friends. I’ve honestly never had scientist friends before, so there is a lot to learn. One of our scientist friends, Wolfgang, is responsible for filling the ice cube trays (which is my job at home) but seeing a scientist do it made me feel like a rank amateur. If there was competitive ice cube tray filling, Wolfgang would be in the elite ranking and I would not have made the preliminaries. “What is he doing?” I whispered to Mary, Wolfg...
My husband Peter is preparing for the End Times. This might not be literally true, but it would certainly appear to be if you checked out the food supplies we have stashed away. Peter hates the fact that packages now contain less than they used to while the price continues to rise. He is infuriated when products substitute less quantity and quality and try to “get away with it.” “Whenever I find a product I like, they discontinue it or change it,” Peter laments. I tell him he sounds like an old person. Peter and I are get...
More than 10 years ago, I was living in Africa (Lagos, Nigeria, to be exact). My life was pretty much a shambles, but I refused to return to the U.S. The reason I didn’t want to come back was because I could not for the life of me figure out what had happened. My husband of 22 years had left without warning. The company I was working my heart out for suddenly dumped me. I found myself in a foreign country (and a difficult one) with no job, no home, no husband, and the most incredible part about all of it — to me — was that I...
I originally joined Facebook when a long-lost cousin sent me an invitation. No one had heard from this cousin in ages when I got a note out of the blue. Facebook was relatively new then and I hadn’t considered joining. But I figured if I could reconnect with family I wouldn’t hear from otherwise, why not? Since then, I’ve become a writer, which means I sit by myself staring out the window for hours at a time. There are about 200 yards of sidewalk I watch most of the day like some sort of hypervigilant Neighborhood Watch...
I saw him just a moment too late, coming down the path. I wasn’t expecting anyone to come down this section of the trail. No one ever did. At least I never saw anyone, which is why I was messing around with the pine cones. OK, I better start at the top. The whole thing started because there was a line of pine cones crossing the trail and it caught my attention. It was just few enough that it could have happened by chance. Did it? I stopped and looked at them. Then, just because I couldn’t help myself, I suppose, I str...
My friend, Andrew, will not use a credit card when paying for his groceries. Andrew is a curmudgeon and has been one for years. He lives alone and has been a dear friend for almost all my life. “It’s none of their darned business how much broccoli I’m buying!” he tells me, as his reason for making these purchases in cash. My husband Peter and I pay for all our groceries with a credit card in order to get points. One year’s worth of groceries (and other things) just about adds up to two airplane tickets to go on vacation,...
I scrutinize myself in the mirror on a regular basis. From the front all is well. I am pushing 60 and holding together reasonably well. From the side it’s another story. I have inherited my grandmother’s neck. My chin is on a mission to meet up with my chest, bypassing my neck entirely. This is a stealth mission, on my chin’s part, but I see what it’s up to. It borrowed the genetic plans from an earlier generation and the descent is inevitable. In a contest between me and gravity, I have a pretty good idea who the winner...
I returned to college after I turned 50. I had been working in business and, for a variety of reasons (reasons that required an entire book to explain) I was no longer willing or able to continue. After a lot of hemming and hawing, I finally decided I would jump through the necessary hoops and start over in an entirely new course of study. I decided, at 50, I wanted to be a writer. I moved out of state and into a converted garage, bought furniture on Craigslist, lived on the stipend the university paid me for teaching, and...
I hear a lot about the next generation-entitled whiners with inflated expectations and unrealistic goals. Recently I had dinner with three of them. My husband, Peter, and I are in Oaxaca, Mexico. It feels like the end of the world, this place where the continent becomes so narrow that the mountains stand with their toes in the water. We are staying in a simple hotel with breathtaking views of the ocean and our fellow guests are all a generation younger than us. The night before I wrote this column, the hotel owners served...
I am a mess around dogs lately. My dog, Milo, died last year. My husband, Peter, and I decided that, given the travel we do, getting a new dog was not a sensible thing to do. (Although I’m not sure what being sensible has to do with dogs.) So, I am without a pet and — while it is sensible — it is also a little lonely. But nearly every day on my walk I encounter a dog and, while I feel a little sorry for the dog’s owner, it’s not my fault: I need my dog fix. I recently read an advice column (you don’t want to know how many ad...
I was nervous the other day because I was going to have scientists in my kitchen. OK, these scientists were friends visiting from out of town, but having company of any type prompts me to notice how dirty my house is. Since scientists were coming, I wondered where I fit on the bell curve of housecleaning. While I’m not at the “ready for hazmat” end, I’m not getting any commendations for cleanliness either. But then, I don’t actually recall ever getting any firm guidelines on how often — or how well — a house should be cle...
Getting my hair cut has never been one of my favorite things. But lately it’s been worse than usual because the town I live in has a shortage of hair stylists and I have a shortage of hair. In order to get a haircut, I had to make an appointment weeks in advance. I was complaining about this to my husband, Peter. He said, (as he always does) “I’ll cut your hair!” “Right.” When the big day of the appointment arrived, I was asked to fill out a full page of questions about my hair styling goals (I had none) and my body shape....
Mandy and Tom, my former sister-in-law and brother-in-law, recently came to visit. Except I don’t call them that because, when I divorced, Mandy announced: “Since you can’t be my sister-in-law anymore, you’ll have to be my sister!” That’s the kind of person Mandy is. Mandy hasn’t changed much in the 30-plus years I’ve known her. But four years ago, Tom had a major stroke. It was touch-and-go for a while and, when he did survive, the prognosis wasn’t good. The doctors didn’t know if he would ever walk or talk again. This was e...
