Episode 110– You can also listen on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Google podcasts, and Amazon Music
About the Episode
In this episode of the “I Love New Mexico” podcast, Bunny delves into the significance of storytelling, emphasizing its role in shaping identity and fostering connections. Bunny shares personal anecdotes from her upbringing in New Mexico, highlighting the influence of family storytelling traditions. Bunny recounts poignant stories, such as community support during World War II witnessed by her father, and encourages listeners to preserve their own memories. By reflecting on her journey and the power of narratives, Bunny inspires the audience to document and share their stories, underscoring the importance of storytelling in building empathy and understanding.
I Love New Mexico blog page
Bunny’s website
I Love New Mexico Instagram
I Love New Mexico Facebook
Original Music by: Kene Terry
About Bunny Terry
Bunny Terry is a native New Mexican who grew up on a farm in northeastern New Mexico. Her first stab at writing was at six, typing stories on index cards on her family’s Underwood, stories that were uncannily like the ones she read over and over in O Ye’ Jigs and Julips, her favorite childhood book. No one thought to save those index cards for posterity, although there is the theory circulated by her siblings that they will certainly be worth millions someday.
She appeared in a national magazine at the ripe age of nine with her crayon rendered likeness of a witch, pumpkin and black cat appeared in the October 1968 edition of Jack and Jill Magazine. No writing, but sure the work of a dedicated artist. Since then, she’s been a high school yearbook editor, writer for the Tucumcari Daily News (which is now the Quay County Sun), and a prolific blogger at www.ilovenewmexicoblog. She’s also written content for a wide variety of businesses in her career as a social media consultant, from birthing centers in Austin to French tablecloth companies in L.A.
Bunny was living in Santa Fe in 2012 when she was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. Her plan had been to take the world by storm with a novel about a Sunday Night Supper Club, comprised of mostly single women in their 50s who were walking the thin line between tragedy and comedy while trying to find true love and enlightenment. She was determined to turn her daily writing practice into a decent novel. But that dream was thwarted by chemo brain (and perhaps some lack of talent and confidence).
Instead of the novel, she wrote 1,000 words a day about the cancer. Prior to this diagnosis, Bunny had been certain she was the healthiest person in the world, or at least the healthiest person in whatever room she found herself. She had a pain in her side one Thursday afternoon, went on a blind date, found herself sick to her stomach, and after blaming the blind date, discovered that she had a 5.5 cm tumor in her ascending colon that had perforated the colon wall and was bleeding out. There was a corresponding tumor on her liver.
For almost a year, Bunny underwent chemotherapy, had surgery to remove large chunks of her colon and liver, and then had chemo again. She was eventually declared NED, which she learned was an acronym for No Evidence of Disease. At the end of that time, she had over 365,000 words compiled, of which about 237 seemed retrievable.
However, thinking that perhaps her words had the power to help at least one cancer patient find hope, she took those 237 words and gathered up a few more and turned them into Life Saving Gratitude, which is a both a story of her survival and a handbook for how gratitude and positivity were indispensable tools in her survival.
Her survival led her to a life of advocacy for cancer patients. After lobbying with and serving on the Grassroots Action Committee of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a national organization dedicated to raising awareness and changing healthcare policy, Bunny was recruited to the Board of Directors for the Cancer Foundation for New Mexico. She now serves as the Board Chair.
Bunny received her treatment and recovered under the care of doctors in Santa Fe and is dedicated to helping other cancer patients navigate the treacherous waters of cancer recovery.
In addition to being a fierce advocate for cancer patients, Bunny also runs a successful marketing and coaching business and sells residential and farm/ranch property as a broker at Keller Williams Santa Fe. Her greatest love, aside from her family and her home state of New Mexico, is giving back with her time and assets. She is devoted to speaking and training her business colleagues while making the lives of cancer patients easier.
Transcript
Bunny 00:00:11 Hi there and welcome to the I Love New Mexico podcast. Usually we have a, a little bit of a canned intro, but I’ve been thinking about that lately and I’ve thought, you know what, I just want to say hello to people rather than you listening to an intro that was recorded maybe six months ago, where I talk about what the podcast is all about. I just want to say hello. I want to thank you for being here. I want to thank you for your interest, interest in New Mexico in general. And this podcast is a place where people who love New Mexico, who have New Mexico stories or New Mexico businesses or, who are just in general fans of the Land of Enchantment, show up to share their stories. And so, rather than starting with our canned intro today, I want to start with a discussion about stories. We say stories save us all the time on the podcast, and I’m sure that’s a phrase that I borrowed from somebody else. Maybe Brene Brown says that.
Bunny 00:01:19 Maybe Celine D’Costa, who I studied for a long time because she said it was really important for us to know what our own stories were. But regardless, I say frequently that stories save us. And I know that my own story about growing up in New Mexico and then being diagnosed with stage four cancer and surviving that and getting to the other side of that at all, all while I continued to write and tell and cherish New Mexico’s stories, that that’s who I am. I’m a person who thrives on stories and who wants to hear other people’s stories. But today I want to inspire you to save a few of your own stories. at the end of the podcast, I’m going to give you just a few tips on things that you can think about that will help you perhaps write down, perhaps record on your phone or somewhere where you have an app where you can create these for posterity. Your own stories. Whether you’re in New Mexico or not, I just think it’s really important for us to start saving and sharing our own stories.
Bunny 00:02:37 I’ve just I started telling stories in this venue and with the I live New Mexico blog about 15 years ago because as I said before in a blog and we’ll include the link here. my friend Elaine said that it was really a good way for our children to know us better, but in the process, it became a way for me to know me better and an a way for me to better understand others. And like I said, I, I studied with Celine DaCosta about how to create your own story. But I knew all along that I come from a long line of storytellers. My dad especially loved nothing better than to sit around a table with a cup of coffee and share stories. I am, I come from a long line of storytellers. My granny, Terrie, loved to sit down with a cup of coffee and start telling stories about when her children were little, about when they came to New Mexico in 1912 and she was a young girl. She loved to share stories, and over the years I’ve had, people, a boyfriend or two probably, who would say after meeting my parents and sitting around for one of those sessions where we shared a lot of stories.
Bunny 00:04:01 Wow, your family sure likes to gossip. And I always, you know, there was there were moments when I thought, is that the truth? Is that what we do? But that response to the rich and frequently really funny and sometimes sad stories I heard at my mom’s kitchen table that was that was incorrect. That wasn’t gossip. There was there were no malicious tales. There were just stories about connections and how complex things were in in small communities. My so my dad would say something like this. This is a story I thought of recently. He’d say, you remember that couple we saw at the Porter reunion? Well, those kids, those kids, well, they they one of them was a Warmoth and the other one was a Gibson. And they got married back in the 60s And. But what I remember is that old man Warmoth, the whole family lived out there, off of that road north of San Juan, out there by where Herman and Jackie lived. And Herman was my mom’s brother and Jackie was my aunt.
Bunny 00:05:15 And then dad would throw in something surprising that I had never heard before. but it wasn’t surprising to him. And but those of us around the table had never heard this about how during World War Two, old Mr. Warmoth was was treated poorly, by some folks in town because of his thick German accent and the fact that we were fighting what everybody then call the Krauts. And my dad would use that word because that was the word that he used. and old Mr. Wermuth had come from the old country as recently as the 20s, and that was the 1920s. And folks stopped talking to him during World War two, and his wife and his kids, and at the grocery store. They would steer clear of them or down at the grain elevator. Folks wouldn’t visit the way that they had before the war. And then my dad says, you know what? Pop, Terry and Mr. Ayers, who is my other grandpa? my grandfathers and a few other men in the Porter and San Juan community. Who knew? Mr. Warmoth is a hard working gentleman farmer who was always willing to help out when it came time to harvest.
Bunny 00:06:31 He’d always come over and bring a tractor, or he’d show up when somebody’s tractor needed fixing. And here my dad would stop and say, boy, he sure knew his way around a tractor. And then he’d go on to tell about how the other farmers in the community started to close ranks around the war myths, and how they all made sure somebody was with him when he went to town, or when they all and they would all shift seats at the Baptist church, which was kind of unheard of, because if, you know, if you go to church on a Sunday morning, Everybody tends to sit in the same place. But during the war, when the warmest were treated so badly they’d shift seats and sit with the warmth. And how that. And these were not my dad’s words. These are my words. But how about silent and really visible support trickle down to the kids in town, and how my dad’s older brothers started to stand shoulder to shoulder with that older Warmoth son at school, and how my mom’s sister, Margaret, would walk down the hallway of Porter School with the sister.
Bunny 00:07:35 And dad didn’t tell these stories as a lesson. He only told them because they were the trail of a memory that had started with that young couple. Young couple to him. I mean, at the time I thought they were plenty old, probably in their 60s that we saw at the Porter reunion. But in the telling of stories like that, it became really clear to me That even as an 11 and 12 year old boy, that was the age of my oldest of my. It’s the age of my oldest grandson now. But even then, my dad had seen firsthand how a community’s bigotry had been handled and put mostly to rest by a small group of men and women with integrity. As he talked about it at the time, my granny Terry started letting folks see that the warmest were coming to the terrace for Sunday dinner after church, or my grandma ers let the women at the box supper and at school know that the prettiest box with the best pie had been brought by the middle Warmoth daughter, and that she and Mr. Ayers, because that’s what my grandma called her husband out in public.
Bunny 00:08:49 Mr. Ayers, we’re sure hoping to see someone deserving with the bidding on the pie auction and get that Warmoth girls box. So there there aren’t enough days in the year or enough hours in the world for me, or you, or for my mother or or for anybody to preserve all the stories in our lives. But one of the reasons that this podcast has so few parameters, other than a 20 to 30 minute time frame, is that I grew up hearing stories that meandered, that started in one place and ended up somewhere completely different. But that in the telling, the unexpected result was that my life and my viewpoint was changed just a little bit. And that’s that’s how stories work, I think. And I’ve I’ve heard my mom and dad tell so many stories together. And now that they’re no longer alive, now that I’m. I lost them last year. They’re stories that they told together. Were almost like singing harmony, because one piece of the story would be about hum. And one, one piece of the story would be about my mom’s particular memory.
Bunny 00:10:13 The other piece would be about my dad stopping and saying, now hang on, that old boy was not the one that drove that Ford pickup. That would be how my dad saw stories, was, not just what people were involved, but what vehicles were involved. But they had developed a lifetime of hearing one another’s stories and then adding to them and then telling them to go together in a way that made their life really harmonious. So. And and I’m sure you’re thinking, what? What’s the point here? The point is that stories connect us and they create. If you. I still really believe in, in my in the farthest part of my heart That if people who are in conflict. If. If you’re a Democrat this week, and if you sat across the table from somebody whose view was politically different from yours, but that you heard their story and you heard the fact that this was this was how their their folks were raised and this is how they were raised, and this is what they believed in most deeply.
Bunny 00:11:25 If you looked somebody in the eye who had a different viewpoint than you, if you’re a Republican, I think the same thing is true. We live in such a divisive time. If you just took time to hear other people’s stories and to understand that what they’re saying is their truth, then perhaps just a tiny bit of the conflict that we find ourselves in might be at least set aside for a moment while we shared something special, I promised that this was going to be a place where I would hopefully inspire you to share your own stories and to, if nothing else, do a brain dump. Of all the things that you’ve been thinking about recently, the stories you were told as a child, or maybe something that happened last week that was surprising and life changing? I think if we’re not recording these stories, then we’re doing a disservice to ourselves and to the rest of the world. And so I want to let you know, one of the ways that I figured out, other than this podcast, which might be extreme for some folks, but I wanted to let you know that one of the ways that I found out how to best share my stories was to start with specific topics, and to promise myself that I would write for a I would write a thousand words, which is not a lot.
Bunny 00:13:04 I’m telling you. It’s like two and a half pages, maybe on a on the computer. And if you’re looking for a better way to record stories, you can also download Olly on your phone and you can just speak into your phone and that will record them. That’s Olly, but one of if you’re going to tell stories, I want you to be really, really specific. And when I say tell, I mean mostly right. I want you to think about let’s let’s think about some topics that perhaps we all share, like think of a time that you were in the kitchen and your mom handed you the beaters off of the mixer and let you taste the first taste of the the chocolate batter that she was going to pour into the pie pan for Sunday dinner. I mean, what what did that what did, first of all, what did your mom look like? Was she wearing lipstick? Was she wearing an apron? Was it sunny outside? Was it a Saturday afternoon when you had spent the morning watching cartoons? And what was the best thing about that Saturday? And what did it feel like to be handed the beaters off from that mixer so that you could have a taste? What did your mom say to you? Did she turn and start doing something else? Did she roll out the pie crust and put it in the oven? What was it like when she took the took the pie crust out of the oven and the steam escaped, and you felt that on your face? I think it’s really good to be specific.
Bunny 00:14:44 You know, what was the color of the linoleum? What what were the countertops like? What was the oven? I mean, was it gas? Was it electric? It’s always so good to go back and think about especially tastes and smells and textures, you know. was there a blanket that your mom threw over you when you sat down to watch TV early on a Saturday morning? Did it have a silky edge? Did you like to rub that between your fingers? Kitchen stories are especially good. What was the first time that your mom or your dad, for that matter, let you pull up to the counter and mix something on your own? What did that taste like? What did it feel like? Other stories that are great are things you did with the kids, in your neighborhood, or in your area of an evening? What was it like when the lights came on? When the porch lights came on? When the streetlights came on? I didn’t live anywhere where there were street lights, but I can think very clearly about what it was like when I would be out.
Bunny 00:15:52 My brothers and I would be out at the basketball goal, which was wear, which was just a hard dirt surface, shooting baskets. And mom would turn on the porch light and yell at us that supper was ready. What did that feel like? Was the air cool? Was the, you know, was your basketball nearly flat? did you have a dog that circled around your legs and telling stories is. So it’s not just about revealing what’s in your heart, but what is in your head and what all of the sounds. You know what? What did it sound like to bounce that basketball on the hard dirt surface? If you can set aside even 20 minutes, two mornings a week to write a thousand words, that includes stories about your grandparents. And I’m going to tell you I have a lot of happy stories. I know there are people who don’t have happy stories, but is is there a teacher who inspired you in some way, and how did it feel to sit in a classroom and hear that teacher call your name at a moment when you weren’t 100% sure what the answer was to the question, but you got it right.
Bunny 00:17:11 What did that feeling of triumph feel like to you? How can you preserve stories about your past life, or even your present life that might in some way feel inspiring and interesting, and might reveal more of you to the people you love than just the daily activities that you share with them. I have something really special that is that was absolutely worth saving. You know, it could have been that my mom could have thrown it away, but one of the things that I got from my sister recently is a manila envelope that she found at mom’s house after my mom passed away that has all these papers that my mom saved. one of them is. Surprisingly, I didn’t know that I did this, but a certificate that I got in the sixth grade for getting 100% on every spelling test that year. Now, maybe the words were really easy. Maybe I had just made that my goal, but I it immediately took me back to sitting down in the starting in the second grade through the sixth grade, where every Friday we would have a spelling test.
Bunny 00:18:35 And I remember holding a pencil between my chubby little fingers in the second grade and the same number two pencils when I was in the sixth grade and laboring over the first five spelling words, and then ten spelling words, and then 20 spelling words, I can’t believe in the sixth grade, I didn’t miss a single spelling word on a spelling test. There were other things in there, and I’ll tell you more about them, but I’m just saying if there’s somewhere in your house that you have a box full of things that maybe you saved from your childhood, or your mom saved from your childhood, or you saved from your children’s childhood, take that box out, take a look at it. Look at the ticket stub from when you went to see John Prine at, I don’t know, at Paulo Solari in Santa Fe. When you were 18 years old, what was your date like? Where where did you eat beforehand? What did you do that was special to you that evening? Like I said before, this is a different podcast episode than you’re used to.
Bunny 00:19:45 But I want you to inspire. I want to inspire you to do what we’ve been doing for the last 104 episodes, I believe, and what I did with my book, Life Saving Gratitude. And that is to consider sharing your stories. If you do nothing besides put them in a box so that your kids will find them when you’re gone. I know you’re going to be happy that you did it. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Thank you for taking time out of your day to be part of this community. And thank you for considering sharing your stories take care.