We lived in Alabama about four years, then we moved to El Paso, Texas.
We left our good friends and moved to a strange, new place.
My dad worked at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and had a long commute every day. He worked in Foreign Intelligence for the Army, though he was a civilian, not military. So we got transferred around as if we were military, but without all the benefits of being actual military.
One of those benefits being, being able to live on the base – we could not live on the base. Since we couldn\’t live on the base, we could not live at White Sands and my dad had to commute from El Paso every day.
And, of course, most of his work was highly classified, so we had no idea what he actually did – though I did learn a little more when I took a job on the base when we were in Germany… but I\’m getting off topic. LOL.
So, back to Texas. El Paso was on the border between New Mexico to the north and Mexico to the south. So we visited Juarez, Mexico a fair bit.
In school, even in Elementary school, we had to learn Spanish because there was so much Mexican influence there. I really didn\’t care about learning Spanish for some reason (could have something to do with my age ;), so I didn\’t learn it very well even in the five years we were there. But there were some things that I learned like the numbers and some greetings and a few other things that have stuck with me and have served me well. I do wish that I had actually tried to learn Spanish, though, and learned more.
My mom, who was a labor and delivery nurse, but who had decided to stay home with her children, got interested in the movement to home births and had her next two children in El Paso at home – Holly and Shari. She learned from a Midwife in El Paso and worked closely with her and helped many other women with their home births. So, I got to experience the wonder of births at a young age.
Our last year, sixth grade for me, I started learning to play in the band at school. I chose to play the Oboe – a very difficult and uncommon instrument, but beautiful sounding. I was able to take private lessons as well, and had a very good instructor. He said I was a good student and planned to teach me to make my own reeds the next year, but then we moved.
That pretty much wraps up our time in Texas. I may expand on some of these in more depth in future posts. But I think this is a good summary of my time in Texas.
