Henrietta

Henrietta spends a lot of time at the ReUse Center at the dump—or transfer station, as the county prefers to call it. While she’s not one of the official volunteers who oversee the donations and try to keep things tidy, she acts as if she is. When I’m there she lets me go through the bags and boxes that people bring in as donations but then goes around rearranging all the shelves of jeans, kids’ toys, shoes, household goods, and blouses. Which is fine with me except that she talks incessantly while she does it: “What do you think this thing is?” she asks about the ab trainer (it took me a while to figure out what it was), or “This is a really nice blouse but I don’t have any place to wear it,” and “This book looks really interesting but I can’t really see well enough anymore to read books.”

Up until last week she was still driving her car even though she can’t see well enough to pass the driver’s test (she has macular degeneration in one eye). Then another driver smashed into her car when she was turning into her driveway and dented the side and wrecked the alignment and she’s waiting to get enough money to fix it. He didn’t have insurance and she didn’t have a license. Now she gets dropped off at the ReUse Center by her caregiver or a friend and gets someone to pick her up or waits for Tommy, who runs the transfer station, to take her home at closing time. It’s a long day for someone who can’t sit down because she’s not strong enough to push herself up out of the chair. So she wanders around the center examining everything and telling whoever’s there what she’s observed.

She also tells us that she was born in Wyoming where her dad worked for the railroad but then he died and the kids scattered across the county and Henrietta ended up in New Mexico. She never married and never had kids and lives alone in a trailer in Peñasco where she brings all the stuff she takes home from the ReUse Center even though she tells me constantly that we all have too much stuff: “I have 25 pairs of jeans in my closet and even if I bring 15 of those pairs here for other folks to have I still have more jeans than I’m ever going to need.”

I’ve never seen her in a pair of jeans, just loose fitting pants that cling to her very skinny legs. Her hair is long and gray and she’s missing a bunch of teeth but her eyes are big and round and compelling. She gets shots in the one with macular degeneration (her caregiver takes her to Santa Fe to the eye doctor) and hopes that it will get good enough for her to get a driver’s license.

I’m afraid that Henrietta is hanging out with a tough crowd, though. She told me last week that the young man who was just arrested for running over another man with a truck and leaving the scene sometimes comes to her house and asks for rides or money or food. He’s known for wandering the streets even though he has a home in one of the villages. When Henrietta tells me that she doesn’t understand what happened, that he’s basically a “good boy,” she points at her head with a finger and says, “but there’s something not right up here.” The police came to her house looking for him after the murder.

Henrietta is 76 years old so she’s had a lot of time to learn to work the system. Life’s going to be even harder, though, without a car and probably push her further into the crowd of other lost souls. Henrietta believes that with God’s help she and the others will be taken care of no matter how difficult things get. In the meantime, at her home away from home, she sorts and rearranges and talks and talks and talks and the volunteer souls who aren’t really lost ones, just kind of annoyed ones, listen and glean what they can from “life’s other side.”