Grace Davis, 84, was a young bride when she arrived in New Mexico by train in Lamy back in 1945. As she embarked from the train, her first thought was, "You've got to be kidding!" Davis, who was born in Los Angeles in 1926, quickly realized the stark contrast of her urban past to her new life in this remote enclave of Northern New Mexico. Nonetheless, she was madly in love with her husband, Deforest Lord Jr. and agreed to be the wife of the first civilian dentist in Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project.

"We only stayed in Los Alamos for a year before moving down to Santa Fe," she said. "It was a fun time and the people there were all very interesting. I remember taking my son Michael on walks in his stroller around town and there were certain canyons that were closed off to the public. I imagine that's where they were dumping nuclear waste."

Deforest Lord Jr., his father and his grandfather all had dental practices in Santa Fe dating back to 1920s. In 1974, Lord Jr. began experiencing night sweats and chills and discovered that he had a cancerous tumor at the base of his skull. In retrospect, Davis believes the cause of her husband's death was exposure to radiation.

As she remembers, "There had been an accident at one of the labs and my husband had to check the teeth of the two scientists involved in the explosion. I believe that those scientists had radiation poisoning and that's when my husband got exposed."

Deforest Lord Jr. died in 1975, leaving Grace as a 49 year-old widow with five young children to support. Fortunately, back in 1968 — when all her children were in school and when she was a den mother for the Boy Scouts and helped out at turkey bingos for Cristo Rey Elementary — she also started working as a sales clerk for David Agnew at the Country Store on Marcy Street. "That job was a godsend. It kept me busy, so when my husband died I didn't have time wallow in grief."

The Country Store gave Davis a social outlet and a means of support, and it's also where she met her second husband, Robert Davis, the former publisher of New Mexico Magazine.

"Robert used to come into the store to shop. My friend Anne Davenport invited me to a Christmas party that he also attended, and we found that we had a lot in common. I'm sure I was the talk of the town, since we were married one year after my husband's death, but it was just meant to be," Grace Davis said.

Robert Davis died seven years later. By age 57 widowed for a second time, Grace Davis decided that she needed a change. She opened the business Paper Unlimited in 1984. Her store, which sells everything from personalized stationery to greeting cards and wrapping paper, began on Marcy Street. Five years later, Grace Davis moved to the business to its current home at the Guadalupe Station Shops on Montezuma Street.

Her sons, Patrick and David, work with her on a daily basis. But her longtime clientele always looks forward to visiting with the store owner, telling her about upcoming weddings and other festive occasions.

"We have all types of customers, from the old Santa Fe locals to the new people that have moved here in recent years. Since the Rail Runner began service, we're also starting to see more people from Albuquerque coming into the store," she said.

She has always been an avid reader with an innate intellectual curiosity who prides herself in being openminded. A couple of years ago, her bookkeeper suggested that she hire a feng shui consultant of the ancient Chinese system of aesthetics to redesign Paper Unlimited's floor plan.

"I was reluctant at first, but business was slow, so I thought, 'Why not give it a try?' " she said. "The consultant suggested that we move our inventory around and that we close one of our two doors since people were walking in one door and quickly exiting the other. The day after we completed our feng shui design, we got a $2,000 order. So now I'm a believer in feng shui, because even in today's Great Recession, we're still here."

Ana Pacheco's weekly tribute to our community elders appears every Sunday. She can be reached at 505-474-2800.