Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities

My Turn - Hindsight brings benefit

My morning walk takes me most days past the scars of a long-ago field that was carved from a flat between two rows of sand hills south of our house.

My father used to tell me it was on this 11-acre plot that he and his brother, Jack, were pressed into "slave labor" by a humorless and unforgiving uncle who planted Irish potatoes there one year, a challenging crop for dry-land farming in eastern New Mexico, even under good conditions.

With benefit of hindsight, I suspect that my great-uncle John had a fear of bankruptcy and starvation rather than an inborn dislike for his nephews, but these homesteading hoodlums saw otherwise.

One wash day they sought sweet revenge, using charcoal to scrawl a mild obscenity across the freshly-laundered seat of John's long underwear as it flapped on the drying line.

What this pair of ne'er-do-wells failed to remember was that the isolation of their early existence here made the pool of potential suspects painfully small. They were apprehended and punished.

Eighty years later telling the story, neither expressed the slightest remorse.

Each morning as I walk the length of that field, I think of those juvenile pranksters, plotting evil as they planted.

It always makes me smile.

In Betty Williamson's family, dirty laundry makes for good memories. You may reach her at [email protected].