My Little Corner of New Mexico
By Jerelyn Elkins Brimer The bright lights of the big city, that’s what I wanted when I was growing up. My head was full of dreams of being famous, of living a life more cosmopolitan than the smalltown existence I had always known. So, twenty years ago, I packed what I could fit in my car and moved to Los Angeles. It’s funny though, how it can take leaving to make a person really see the richness and beauty of a place. Even after all these years, coming back home to visit still feeds my soul and grounds me, reminding me of all I miss about our little corner of New Mexico. I was born in Grants, and when I was in fifth grade, we moved to a ranch near Chaco Canyon. My best friends were my two younger brothers, mostly because they were the only kids around for miles. We attended school in Crownpoint, and most weekends we worked the ranch, often on horseback from sunup to sundown. The trips we took to Gallup to go shopping at the Rio West mall and to eat lunch at Furr’s or Sizzler became a coveted treat. My favorite nights were those when we went to the meetings of the Trailblazers 4-H Club in Thoreau. I waited for Bi-County Fair with more anticipation and excitement than I did for birthdays or Christmas. Raising animals, seeing friends, going to the dances, and competing in the kids’ rodeo are some of my most cherished memories as a child. If I had
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a cup of the fresh-squeezed lemonade that was sold by the tumbleweeds 4-H Club, I’d be transported back to those carefree fair days as if I’d fallen into a time machine. And the Navajo Taco with red chile which you could get at the fairgrounds was a culinary delight I still crave to this day. Living in a city where there is a light-polluted sky, developing an appreciation of the heavens is inevitable. In Los Angeles, a few dim stars or planets are really all that you can see. When I was a kid, I never really looked up at night unless my science teacher in Crownpoint, Mr. Ogle, told us about some celestial event that we just couldn’t miss. Now, whenever I’m visiting my family near Prewitt, one of my favorite things is to spend some time looking up at the heavens. Did you know you can actually glimpse the Milky Way snaking a fuzzy path across the night sky? The millions of points of light, each representing stars and galaxies and planets, leaves me in awe and feeling like a tiny speck in the vast universe. Los Angeles moves at a dizzying speed; you must adapt and move fast, too, or be shoved to the side. Buildings, cars, and people are stacked on top of each other, a concrete jungle for miles unless you are lucky enough to live by the beach. At one of my first jobs in LA, I shared my longing for the wide-open spaces of New Mexico with one of my co-workers, who laughed and said I sounded like the Dixie Chicks song. She had never seen the red rocks outside
