| the years, more than time passing. It's the place. It's the desert and the mountains, the cloudbursts and sandstorms, and the sun, always the sun. |
| Looking back, way back before World War II and even before the Depression, I see an eager, impulsive little girl, growing up in the sun-baked city. Her brown curls, cut short in the new boyish bob, are blown almost straight by the dry desert wind, and her naturally blue eyes look even bluer against her suntanned face. In spite of Mama's warnings she can never remember to wear a sun hat. In her sleeveless, sun-back dresses and brown sandals she roams the desert, watches the sunrise, the sunset, the ever-changing shadows, gathers odd-shaped pods and seeds, and unconsciously, day after day, puts down her own roots as tough and enduring as those of the desert plants she loves. |
| Mountain Avenue was the last paved street on the northern rim of the city. The black asphalt pavement started at the foothills of Mount Franklin on the west and ran downhill in a straight line all the way to Fort Bliss on the east. Our block, on the steep, upper end of the hill, consisted of seven or eight look-alike red-brick bungalows. Each house had a wide front porch shaded by Virginia creeper which against all odds managed to flourish in the dry, desert air. The only exception to the brick bungalows was the small flat-roofed, Spanish-style stucco building on the lower corner of the block next to Copia Street. Its white walls glistened in the sun like a spatter of rhinestones. The large letters, scratched with Bon Ami on the plate glass window facing Mountain Avenue, announced the building's useful purpose: HAIR CUTS 25 CENTS. |
| On across Copia, with plate glass windows facing both Copia and Mountain, was Quinn's Grocery and Market. The plainness of its red brick walls was broken by the brown canvas awnings that Kerry Quinn let down every morning to protect the fresh produce behind the windows from the merciless sun. A truck, bearing the sign "Quinn's Grocery and Market," and beneath that, in smaller letters, "Free Delivery," was parked on the Copia side of the store, if Kerry didn't have it out on delivery. Mrs. Quinn worried about the way Kerry drove, always cutting around corners on two wheels, and even sneaking the truck out at night and taking it to Juarez. She |
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cm. (The Chisholm Trail series : no. 19)