By this time, I had dropped out of high school for a year. In between many cowboy girl tasks there was a lot of other work. We used a wood stove to heat the house in cold weather--and it was colder then--and got a lot of fire wood plus fence posts and corral rails on Dad's mining claims up on Mingus.
Dec 6, 1959 Sun
No vacation today, We spent the morning getting ready to go up to Mingus to get wood. I wanted Mom to go and let me stay but no deal. Well, at least RE didn’t come by while I was gone (not that I expected him to.) We left about eleven and spent a long and weary day getting both the trailer and the truck full of wood. I positively exhausted myself. We got a tremendous load and got safely home with it. I am grateful for that.
It is funny how life files you down and how it will hurt you worse if you fight it. If you find your own little groove or slot that fits you, you slid along rather painlessly. I am inclined to fight tooth and toenail. Somehow I sort of feel I was “meant for better things” but I guess that is pure fallacy.
I just hope I’ll get another chance with RE, He does not exactly fit all my fancy plans but he does fit a lot of my specifications. There isn’t a day pass that I don’t think of him. I want him to be my friend and more than that. I can just hope for another chance. Au revoir, G
Work--that was the "subject" I studied for the short year away from normal school from about 1 Nov 1959 until 1 Sept 1960, that and guys LOL We cut a lot of firewood and often got it in either the big F700 Ford flatbed truck that was our hay and livestock hauler or in the pickup with either the open rack farm trailer or the horse trailer dragged behind. Dad wielded the chainsaw and Charlie Mike and I usually did the drag and pack mule work to get it to the vehicle(s) and loaded. Mom usually got to stay home and take care of Alex, then just May-Dec old. I didn't mind being the baby sitter but did not do that often. The Allen Spring Road which was the shortest route up there had frequent washouts after the Mingus fire in 1956 so getting around some sharp inside curves could be a bit iffy at times. A safe trip was thus a relief!
RE was my current heart-throb--more or less. He worked for the project of putting in the gas lines for El Paso or was it Southwest Gas? Anyway natural gas came to the Verde that summer and fall and he drove a tractor for the digging and filling of the ditches. I had several nicknames for him as I did for most of my fancies but his name was Richard Edwards and for awhile we did not quite date-I was not allowed--but kind of got a thing going.Oddly the folks never raised much Cain about my talking to him and even him coming by a time or two to 'visit' with me in the early evening--between chores and supper. However no happy ending to this tale--happened just a few days after this point. For a long time that seemed to be the story of my life...looking for love in all the wrong places as the old country song went. My darn "romance addiction" was slated to do me in!
Not many pix--a sketch I did of RE and the yard-swallowing woodpiles in one of Alex taken that winter. Most of the wood was supposed to be for fixing up "the ranch" down south of Bridgeport but eventually ended up in the wood stove to heat the house. Charlie Mike and I hand sawed and split a lot of it, carried it in, took out the ashes... Yeah, we studied work. And the last, a couple of years earlier as it shows the Jeep pickup and not the Ford but on the same road and an example of the washouts. Somebody had lost a muffler--not us. Drag an 18' trailer behind a truck over that? Whoa! Too much fun. This was in the middle of a tight u-turn, too.
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