A Woman of the Century, Frances Minerva Nunnery (1898–1997): Her Story in Her Own Memorable Voice as Told to Cecil Dawkins

Introduction

❙ INTRODUCTION ❙ ❙ 1 ❙ I came to know that just about everybody in Northern New Mexico knew Frances, but I only met her when, after spending the summer of 1969 in Taos and realizing how much I hated to leave,I walked into the first real estate office I came to—a store front just off Taos plaza with a few animal skulls and Indian pots in the windows.The sign over the door said Northern New Mexico Real Estate Exchange. Reared back in her swivel chair with her feet in cowboy boots up on the desk sat a woman with arresting blue eyes in a face like the map of some mountain terrain,lines and tributaries branching off in all directions. She wore a beret I came to know as standard headgear subduing her fine silver hair,a flashy turquoise-and-silver watchband on her wrist, and a saucer-size turquoise-and-silver buckle on her belt.Frances that day was one month shy of her seventy-first birthday. Those eyes were assessing me, waiting for me to speak up. I said I wanted to look at land. That morning Frances showed me eleven acres in Des Montes with views of the Truchas peaks to the south, Taos Mountain to the east, and to the west the sage desert with the Rio Grande Gorge streaking through. A crumbling ruin backed by cottonwoods and an old orchard with pear,apple,apricot,and green ❙ INTRODUCTION ❙ gage plum trees squatted between two irrigation ditches.We walked the length of the acreage and back,Frances in her cowboy boots,her back as straight as an aspen. I was ready to buy the place then and there,but the owner was out of town and I had to leave Taos the next morning. But driving cross-country I kept seeing that ruin and those spectacular views. When I returned to Taos the following May the land was still for sale and I bought it. People told me to bulldoze the ruin out of the way, but Frances said I could save part of it. So I began shoveling off the sod roof to get to the vigas. In goggles, with a bandanna over my mouth, I took a sledge hammer to the rotted bricks on top of the walls till I came to adobe as hard as concrete, then began building my adobe house. When business brought her out my way, Frances stopped by to see how the project was coming along. One day she asked if I liked to fish. I said I did. She told me to meet her at her place the next morning at five A.M. Fishing was Frances’s passion. She liked getting an early start. She had packed—I learned she always did—a picnic lunch of barbecued ribs and potato salad. Toward the end of this book she tells of getting to know writers and artists from theWurlitzer Foundation. I’m sure some were along on that first outing to Hopewell Lake. Several,like me,bought land through Frances and settled in Taos.We fished all day, ate ribs and potato salad and, as Frances had a clear blues voice and liked to sing, we sang all the way home. Frances loved cars. She’d had a Cadillac convertible in her sixties. When I knew her she owned three vehicles—a Ford Bronco for business and the mountains, a VW camper for the fishing trips, and a Thunderbird convertible,robin’s-egg blue with a white top,for meeting prospective clients at the Albuquerque airport. It was hard for Frances to give up a prized possession.She kept that T Bird for years after she could no longer drive and you could no longer buy the leaded regular gas it took. She finally sold it in her nineties when, she said, she and the T Bird were both classics. 2 ❙ INTRODUCTION ❙ She was also well into her nineties when she gave me all her fishing gear because, she said,“I guess I won’t be fishing any more.” Her last fishing trip was already ten years in the past when one afternoon , unable to stand for any length of time, she’d set herself down in a lawn chair with its feet and her own in the shallow water of a lake near Silver City and baited and cast as expertly as always. When I...