Today I’m grateful for my maternal grandparents. Who were they and what’s their story? How did they get to New Mexico?
They met in Seymour, Texas, where tall, lean, blue-eyed Frank Ayres courted Myrtle for a series of Sundays in 1913 and 1914, taking her out in a buggy after church for afternoon rides through the country.
My Grandpa Ayres was a man of the fewest words, so I have no idea what they talked about. But Grandma talked enough for two people, so perhaps there was no need for him to do much more than control the horses and listen.
At some point, after many Sundays, he asked her to marry her, and she used to tell my cousin Susie and me, the two youngest of at least thirty grandkids, that of course she said yes. She had been in love with him from the beginning. Frank took the liberty of kissing her right then and there. It was their first kiss.
Then he tried to kiss her a second time when they arrived back at the house where she lived with her parents. When she told the story well into her eighties, she always said, “Well, I never in the world knew why he thought he could kiss me twice! I slapped him and jumped off that buggy and ran in the house.”
Somehow it worked out, because they got married and moved eventually to Porter, New Mexico, a tiny community between San Jon and Logan on the eastern plains, raising ten children and farming together until they moved to Tucumcari in 1964.
Their children, the youngest of whom is my mother, Betty Terry, said that they never heard them raise their voices to one another. Grandma went to her grave saying that Frank was the love of her life, the absolute finest man that ever lived.
I have about a thousand stories about these two faces. It’s a gift to know that I come from stock like this.
Faces are important. Stories are even more important. My theory is that once you see someone face to face, it’s difficult to focus on your differences.
Maybe what we need more of right now is to see one another eye to eye. Let’s start wherever we can.
Bunny Terry is a native New Mexican who grew up on a farm in northeastern New Mexico. Her first writing job was typing stories on index cards on her family’s Underwood, stories that were uncannily like the ones she read over and over in O Ye’ Jigs and Julips, her favorite childhood book. No one thought to save those index cards for posterity, although there is the theory sarcastically circulated by her siblings that they will certainly be worth millions someday. 