A Suburban Wife

That year, on New Year's Eve, we were in a bleak rent house in Albuquerque, New Mexico, without any furniture.

We made the best of it. 
For a couple of nights, we had an air mattress for me to sleep on. The rest of the family slept in sleeping bags on the floor. 

S.C. started working right away. 

The furniture and our belongings finally arrived.

The weather was frigid. If I hung any washing on the line, it turned into a sheet of ice in a matter of minutes.

Perhaps all the this moving affected me. Cissy came before her time. And when I was in the hospital, S.C. found a brand new brick home in a new housing development, at the foot of Sandia Mountains. He purchased it. We moved into it right after I got out of the hospital.
Those days, it did not take long to get a mortgage. We had the down payment, we had excellent credit, and we secured the loan right away.

Albuquerque, New Mexico, is quite different from Texas. The altitude took a bit getting used to. Learning to cook at high altitude was one of the things I had to adjust to.

Our house was larger and better than the one we had in Austin, TX.  From my kitchen window, I could see the snow-capped mountains. We had a terraced back yard. And since we were high up, we could see the lights of downtown from our backyard at night.
I like the mountains, but I never got used to the sand storms and the tumble weeds.

When spring came, we started to put in a yard. We planted trees, shrubs, and flowers. We tried to put in a lawn. We sowed seeds and watered them every hour or so for days. Then the wind came and blew all the grass-seeds into our neighbor's yard. We had to start over again. We did that three times - can you believe that?
We did grow some lovely roses, and they bloomed from spring till early winter.
And, of course, S.C. had his vegetable garden.

S.C.' lab was on the campus of University of New Mexico, which was some ten miles from our house.
We needed a second car, now that we have three children and live in the suburb. And I needed a driver's license.
I had learned to drive in Hong Kong  - but it had been a while and I needed to learn to drive on the opposite side of the street from Hong Kong. I did learn to drive a stick shift. So the automatic drive was a breeze. However, it did not work for S.C. to give me any lessons - so we enlisted some friend's help.
I passed the test and got my driver's license. We bought another car.

So with a husband,
     three kids,
     a three bed-room house,
     a television,
     a dishwasher,
     a washer and a dryer,
     a two-car garage,
     and 2 cars,
my life as an American suburban wife began.