Border Street: Neighbor's life has been no bed of roses

By Tina Griego, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Monday, October 16, 2006

The Fed Up neighbor spends the weekend on the eastern Plains, in the small Colorado town where she was born and raised and which she left to accompany a husband whose need for the bottle gradually stripped their marriage of its early promise so that not long after settling in their new home, their relationship fell apart for good.

She could have gone back home, such as it was. The Fed Up neighbor never knew her parents. They married, had her, divorced. When she 10 months old, her mother left her with her parents and moved to California.

It was not until the Fed Up neighbor was in her 40s that she was able to ask her mother why. Why didn't you want me? And her mother, who went on to have 16 more children, could only say: It was for the best.

And maybe it was, the Fed Up neighbor says. Her grandma was strict - mean, even - but her grandfather was kind, and when her grandmother went out to pick spinach by the railroad tracks, he would give her a paper cup of ice cream and they would sit side by side in the front yard.

Her grandma always discovered the evidence and would chew out her grandpa. It was the only time her Spanish-speaking grandma spoke English, when she was cursing. The Fed Up neighbor may have started first grade with the school's most unique vocabulary.

Don't think you are bringing your kids and coming back here to live with me, her grandma told the Fed Up neighbor after her divorce.

I'm not going back, the Fed Up neighbor vowed and she never did, demonstrating a force of will most recently revealed in the straight-backed, nostril-flaring, fingernail-tapping way she views her younger, noisier, less courteous neighbors and says, "This is my home and you are not driving me out."

She moved to Border Street during the early '70s, when the neighborhood was making its gradual change from American-born whites, the children of Great Depression refugees, to American-born Hispanics, the children of farmers and ranchers looking for stable work.

As much as they had in common, the deep roots in Colorado and New Mexico, the Spanish-speaking upbringings, the desire to better themselves, the people of Border Street were not particularly close. It's never been that kind of neighborhood, the Fed Up neighbor says. We didn't have barbecues or go over to each other's houses or anything like that, she says. With few exceptions, relationships among adults have been forged out of need, from mutual purpose, not affection.

The Fed Up neighbor, alone with four children, the oldest of whom was 8, went on welfare for the first three years after her divorce and then she started working again. She often worked two jobs, waitressing, clerking, cleaning. She soldered needles for 10 years in a factory before moving on to a hospital housekeeping job. She's now the manager of a construction site.

The Fed Up neighbor is a guarded person and it is only after several months of conversations that she talks about her personal life. She was angry for many years, she says, and not surprisingly, so were her children, particularly the younger two who proved to be as willful as she and who would later struggle with alcoholism and addiction. After several particularly tough years, the Fed Up neighbor gained custody of two of her grandchildren, one of whom was born with serious physical maladies.

Seven years ago, her 9-year-old granddaughter, the girl she was raising, was killed. She was visiting her father and he left the kids in an idling car in the driveway while he ran inside to grab a car seat. His 2-year-old grandson put the car into gear. As it began to roll backward, the kids panicked and jumped out. The girl was crushed.

The Fed Up neighbor keeps her picture in her living room with the inscription: "God's own angel."

Her death changed the family, the Fed Up neighbor's son says. He says he quit his job as a plumber and became a sheriff's deputy because he believed it would be a way to right wrongs, to restore order to the world. It's hard to say whether the same need for order now drives his mother to complain about a neighbor's laundry on the fence or the loud music at night. Perhaps it is that in a life punctuated by loss, she refuses to have anything else taken from her. Not the peace of her evenings. Not the sanctity of her home.

"It's about respecting your neighbors," she says. "It's the way I was raised, and yeah, it was a hard life, but it's a matter of how you survive. I don't regret the way I was raised one bit. I learned to respect myself and appreciate what I have."

While visiting her hometown over the weekend, she wondered if she could ever live there again. "It was so quiet and peaceful," she says.

But, when she arrives home Sunday night, she drives past the kids playing in the street and into her driveway and she notices her son has raked the leaves for her and soon her daughter will arrive to do laundry and the Fed Up neighbor's face will brighten when she sees her. This is my home, she says.

"Maybe one day I'll move," she says. "But not until I can't fight no more."

griegot@RockyMountainNews.com