West Texas Resilient

I was recently asked if I knew where my resilience to survive and thrive through my disease came from. I really had to think about it. 

Maybe these memories will tell a little bit. 

As the oldest of five kids and the only girl, I was pretty independent. I can remember being too short to reach the stove without a chair and frying up a piece of bologna for a mustard, white bread and bologna sandwich. 

If we didn’t have bologna, that was okay. Mustard, lettuce and white bread was just fine. And even just a mustard sandwich was A-ok!

I grew up in the high desert in West Texas. We lived in a little bitty town 121 miles east of El Paso. 

Van Horn, Texas. 

No stop light. 

No Dairy Queen but we had a Dairy King. 

No big name grocery stores. 

Lots of motels and gas stations though. After all, if you missed getting gas here you weren’t going to make it out of the state. 

It’s funny when I look back on being a kid here. We had no movie theater. Our drive in theater burnt down. Our playgrounds were hard soil and rocks. Summers were hot. Dust storms were scary. Stickers, and giant ants and tarantulas and snakes. 

But... 

I loved it there. I mean I really did. It was life lived at a very slow pace, and full of innocence. 

One thing I remember is that the rainstorms smelled like heaven. If you’ve never smelled the desert as it’s just getting wet, it’s unforgettable. There’s a freshness. A clean smell. I miss it. 

There were also rocks...

And arrowheads...And older people who remembered when the steam trains would stop in town. In fact, one of the ladies down the street was the last living relative of Judge Roy Bean...the only law West of the Pecos. I think her name was Miss Clara. 

My brother and I got to walk around town all by ourselves. We were five and six at the time. Itty bitties. But what we didn’t know was every place we stopped, some sweet lady was calling my mom and letting her know we had made it there. But we learned how to be independent. We learned how to count money for our ice cream cones at the pharmacy. We bought plants at the Flowershop and put them on my dad’s tab. We always stopped by the electric company where my brother would get a kiss on the cheek, I would get a piece of hard candy, and we would both get ice cold water handed to us in little paper cones. I think her name was Vesta. 

As far as playgrounds...the whole desert was ours. My mom would have worn our bottoms out had she known we played in the ditch by the railroad tracks in the midst of West Texas Rainstorms. It became our Amazon River filled with imaginary piranhas and Boa Constricters. Some people might have called the water we were playing in a flash flood. We called it a temporary swimming hole. 

We looked for rocks out in the desert. Caught horny toads. And Sandlot baseball has nothing over the games we played in the lot across the street. 

You see. Part of resilience is the ability to make the best of whatever situation you find yourself in. My brother and I learned to do that. Our family was pretty poor. We had our needs met and we were always clean, but sometimes a mustard sandwich was all we had. 

Also, we lived in a tough situation. My dad, bless his heart, fought an addiction with alcohol for decades. When he was under the influence, he wasn’t very nice. We grew up knowing that our friends couldn’t come over for sleepovers. Dad did finally find victory and peace. 

But I truly think that getting to be kids in a place that challenged our imaginations helped to give us strength. Resilience. 

No, I don’t eat bologna anymore. And mustard is put sparingly on any sandwich I now make on my whole grain bread. 

But I still long to smell rain in the desert. 

And I still love to hunt for rocks.