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One day when I stopped by the bank in Belen, Mrs. Herlihy, who worked there,said,“Frances,why don’t you quit working so hard and do some investing with us?” I told her I didn’t have enough money to invest in anything. She said,“Oh yes you do. In these times a lot of people come near losing their property.If you pay them for their equity,instead of getting foreclosed they get their money out of it. Once you own the property we can carry your balance here at the bank just as we carried it on the lodge. In other words, you just assume the loan. Then you can rent the place or sell it, do whatever suits you. And you’re in the real estate business.” Not having anything better to do, I followed her suggestion. I got my license and built an office onto the ranch house in Datil and went into real estate. By now I was a grandma. Anita and Buzz had several children, three girls and a boy.They’d been living on the ranch in Mountainair, but Buzz decided he wasn’t cut out for a rancher. He wanted to go into business hauling limestone for a cement plant outside of Albuquerque in Tijeras Canyon.For that he needed heavy equipment. 20 ❙ I TRY REAL ESTATE ❙ 122 ❙ ❙ I TRY REAL ESTATE ❙ So I put my Black Angus on rented pasture in Mora and traded the place at Mountainair and went on a note with him to buy two hydraulic trucks and a bulldozer. He moved the family into Albuquerque. Ever since I was a little kid on the wheat farm in Kansas, I’d kept up with my stepsister Doris Bichel. She’d been teaching all these years in Michigan, but now she decided to come out west and teach on the Zuni reservation. She spent the summer with me on the little ranch I still had in Datil, and for a spell we got into the dog business , with kennels in Albuquerque and Socorro. Doris ran the one in Albuquerque and a nurse friend of hers from the reservation ran the one in Socorro.I helped with the financial end of things,but otherwise I wasn’t much involved. I was doing a little real estate business, but it looked like I couldn’t get ranching out of my blood. That spring I traded the turkey ranch in Datil for a larger spread at Eagle Nest and moved my cattle up from Mora.The Eagle Nest ranch was a beautiful place.A hill on the ranch laterbecamethesiteof theVietnamMemorialthefellowbuilttohonor his son who died over there. I got Maggie and Bill Guiness, my fishing buddies, to come take care of the cattle.And Doris came up during school vacation. I was spending the summer fishing the Cimarron River without a notion in my head of what a winter in Eagle Nest was like. Fall went by and winter set in. Then it started to snow.When the snow got up past the windowsills and I had to hire somebody with a bulldozer to come clear the road so I could get to Cimarron for stock feed, I decided the place was too cold for my mother cows and too cold for me. I loaded the cattle in stock trucks and moved them back to Mora for the rest of the winter. During the thaw I sold that ranch. Then in the spring I moved to Taos. 123 ...

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