Las Cruce: A Short Story

When I was almost 13 years old, my parents told my sisters and me we were moving from our hometown of Lanham, to a place called Las Cruces, NM. I was pretty excited about the move, even though it meant leaving all my friends and family behind. When we moved it was about the middle of autumn. As we left Maryland, leaves were starting to fall, the air was getting colder, birds were migrating towards a warmer climate, and the days were getting shorter. I can remember after our road trip and my family and I had arrived at our new house and one of the first things we had to do was go to the grocery store. It was night-time, so it was a little cold as the sun had already set. I can still feel the stares of the locals as they

You see, while it was cold, the locals only wore light denim jackets. My family and

I had underestimated just how warm we thought the weather would be. Humidity also played an important part since the lack of moisture contributed to the feeling of warmth throughout our stay. In

Maryland, it is not uncommon to get several feet of snow in a storm at least once a year. In New Mexico, an inch can paralyze a city, even though it melts by noon. As I got to know New Mexico better, I noticed vast differences between my former and current state of residency. In New Mexico, it is rare to have real grass in your yard. Many people have rocks or just plain sand or dirt. In some cases, people get artificial grass installed on their lawn. I learned the reason for this was that the state put restrictions on how often you could water your lawn as desert conditions warranted this. People later told me that it’s not uncommon to go six months without a decent rainfall.

While we were there, we experienced 9 months without rain! I can remember seeing some cars that didn’t even have windshield wipers

Some animals that are native to New Mexico include coyotes, wolves and oryxes. We first noticed the oryx once we moved from the city of Las Cruces to an area at the bottom of the Organ

Mountains. The best way to describe this animal is that it is a grazing antelope. An oryx has a black, white, and brown body along with a black tail like that of a horse and two long horns on its head. It is fiercely protective of its young and has been known to charge vehicles that, even though they are far away, were just looking at their young. Maryland native animals include ruffled grouse, deer, robins, blue jays, orioles, furbearers, pheasant, crow, cottontail rabbit and squirrel gray and eastern foxes.

Cardinals are also often spotted in the winter. None of these animals can be found in New Mexico.

Maryland and New Mexico were similar because we have some of the same birds like house finches and hummingbirds. Native plants are also very different when compared to those in Maryland. When living near the mountains, our backyard naturally grew green amaranth instead of grass. My parents are Caribbean, so when they saw they plant, they recognized it as an edible dish, known as callaloo. Although we had