Amazon, probably. Family Thrift and Savers after that. Travelocity got a fair amount of our money this year.
I would need to shop more in my life, but Keith represents our family at Costco and all I have to do is write the list and help bring things in.
Gratuitous, unrelated photo:
That's me in the left of the photo, at 14, in my room in the back of the house pictured below. My room had been a canning room, and was half in the ground. The wall behind the shelves was bare adobe. The others were plastered and painted.
The other three people are Max Rasamimanana, Nada Merrifield, and Debbie Hathcock. Debbie was visiting from Amarillo, Texas. Her dad was John. Nada's mom was Doris. My mom was Mary Lou. They were three of seven siblings, and Nada, Debbie and I were all born within an eight month timespan, in 1952-53. Nada lived with us. We met Max at Ghost Ranch when we were at 4-H camp (Nada and I, and Annette Delay, Ymelda and Dolores Martinez, Annette DeLay, and I'm not remembering if there were others. Probably were. Max was working in the dining hall, working at Ghost Ranch for a summer job between semesters at Wooster College in Ohio. He was from Madagascar and was really interesting. He came to visit at our house one weekend and at Annette's once. English was his fourth language after Malagasy, French and German. We were pretty impressed by his international experiences and knowledge. He had seen real monkeys, for one thing! (Lemurs or something.)
The reason I found that photo and scanned it is that an editor from Rex Features wanted a photo of me at 14, and there it is.
Debbie is the one who went through the promo albums first, and gave her rejects to Nada.
Nada is the one who went through that pile, saved some, and gave her rejects to me.
I had the David Bowie album.
My room was in the middle of the back, so if you were sitting in that station wagon at the left, you'd be facing my room, and the porch outside of Nada's room. That house was built in 1915, I think, but the farm was older, so there was another house before that one. It was on Lower San Pedro Road, in Española.
What a coincidence. My mom lived at Ghost Ranch for several years (probably in the late 50's or early 60's) with her family when she was growing up. Her dad, Frank, was the maintenance manager or something of the sort. My mom has wonderful memories of the college students who would work there during the summers and great memories of Ghost Ranch in general. I think my mom and her siblings attended McCurdy during that time.
ReplyDeleteI would've liked to have gone to McCurdy but we were poor. I went to Española Elementary, Española Jr. High (and later taught there, and that's the sweatshirt Nada's wearing up above), and Española High (now they have Española Valley High).
ReplyDeleteGhost Ranch is beautiful.
Your comment puzzled me, because my mom's family was pretty poor, too, so I asked her and she thinks that Ghost Ranch may have subsidized their tuition because there wasn't a close school (and there were five of them!). My mom's family was at Ghost Ranch from about 60-65. Her dad *was* the maintenance manager and her mom was the housekeeping manager. My aunt's husband is also from the Espanola area and I'm pretty sure they met there more than 40 years ago! So, lots of connections with that area for my family, even though she never took me or my sister up to visit Ghost Ranch.
ReplyDelete