Picture from: ghost ship the-nicest-pictures.blogspot

Looking for a shot of seasonal spine-chill? You can’t beat deep sea specters and ghost ships for getting into the spirit. That’s why two local libraries are hosting a richly illustrated presentation by cruise ship lecturer, Ann Payton Williams. “Hair Raisers from the Deep: Ghost Ships, Kraken, Sharks, and Worse” will air at Florence’s John C. Fremont Public Library and the Cañon City Public Library on October 21st and 25th respectively.
“Hair Raisers from the Deep” recalls stories of sea monsters like Kraken that haunted early sailors. The terrifying Kraken of old are now called squid, but they’re still monstrous, voracious, and armed with the stuff of nightmares.

Photo from: popculturezoo.com

News from a growing wave of shark-huggers lightens the vibe. It seems jaws aren’t so bad. That tendency to sever an occasional leg is nothing personal, but Ann shares tips for avoiding lost limbs.
“Hair Raisers from the Deep” is part of a “Sea Secrets” presentation collection that Ann developed for cruise ship audiences. To add colorful details and personal involvement to the talks, she participated in shark tagging expeditions, whale watching cruises, dolphin research, educating guests at the Denver Aquarium, and other adventures.

Ann assisting in a shark tagging operation.

“I was blessed with a gig teaching creative writing on the Holland America Cruise Lines World Tour which took us down the east coast of South America into Antarctica and across the South Pacific to Australia. We had so many enthralling experiences, watching moray eels, turtles, whale spouts, flying fish, and penguins swimming underwater. It was so crazy to see the waves break and bunches of penguin heads pop out.”
Before tackling Sea Secrets, Ann coordinated the Pueblo Community College science lab, taught biology, and created the Kids Chemistry Kits program to make science activities easily available to community groups. She also assisted in writing lab manuals, which led her to take up travel writing on the side. Her articles were published in magazines and newspapers around the country.
“Hair Raisers from the Deep” will be offered at 2:00 pm on Tuesday, October 21st at the John C. Fremont Public Library, 130 Church Avenue, Florence. It is also scheduled for 2:00 pm on Saturday, October 25th at Cañon City Public Library, 516 Macon Avenue, Cañon City.
Ann will return to the Cañon City Public Library from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm on November 1st for the Local Author Sale event. Along with her two novels and family biography, she’ll display hands-on science novelties to highlight Mile High Lab Rat, a mystery novel set in a science lab based on her experiences at Pueblo Community College.

Ann’s mystery novel

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Cottonwood pods preparing to broadcast seeds on cotton fluff.

Cotton collected on a Grand Mesa trail

Cottonwoods are notorious for spewing cotton each spring, but the trails my husband and I followed on Colorado’s Grand Mesa were far from cottonwood country. So why was cotton everywhere? We were surrounded by aspens and spruce, and as far as we knew, neither produced cotton. Spruce trees launch their seeds in cones. Why would they make cotton? Suspicious. I scrutinized grove after grove and finally spotted fluffy tufts wafting off an aspen treetop.

More Grand Mesa cotton

I’m a fifth-generation Colorado native who’s spent considerable time in the mountains. I’ve also watched three aspen clusters in our yard for over 35 years, so how did I miss this cotton production trait for over half a century?
As it turns out, aspens are rife with secrets. I’ve often read that aspen groves stem from a single root system so are considered one organism rather than a grouping of individual trees, but I didn’t know that the aspen’s lifespan is phenomenal. Utah’s Fishlake National Forest hosts the oldest known aspen grove…which is also the oldest known organism of any kind—80,000 years!
I once followed a hiking guide who disparaged aspens as being “trash trees” because they are generally short-lived. When I shared that assessment with a friend, she quoted another guide who’d called aspens “soda straws” because they are full of water. They’re prized fire suppressors protecting their more flammable conifer neighbors. 
Another unexpected nugget I discovered is that the aspen’s white bark hides a green photosynthetic layer which continues producing sugar through the leafless winter. Deer and elk use these calories cached beneath the tender bark to survive harsh winters.
The mention of tender bark revives a mystery I happened on a while back. Ugly scars on the aspens along a ranch’s access track made me wonder what happened to them. The rancher explained that elk rub their antlers against the bark. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service website confirms that deer and elk rub their antlers on tree trunks to rid themselves of velvet which is also interesting stuff but beside my point that the animals might be eating the bark as well.
One final humiliation before I quit: I’ve always considered aspens to be exclusive to the American West.

Trying, but not quite one with nature….

Wrong again. Some aspens are easterners. They’re also found in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Coloradans may be blessed, but we sure don’t know it all.

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Photo from blog.libgen.tw

At a scenic overlook in northeastern Oregon, an iridescent green spider caught my eye. Our granddaughter Mysa has a fascination for spiders, so I got my camera out. Then I noticed that the spider was struggling. One of its legs seemed to be stuck to our truck door. It twisted one way and then another, fighting a stiff breeze along with being stuck. I helpfully took a video.

Glancing around to see if my husband was ready to go, I turned back to the truck and saw the spider glide by using a long strand of web as a magic carpet. 

Mysa and spider

Really? Spiders can do that? I Googled it, and yes! Some spiders shape their silk into a ball instead of a streamer, so the flights are called ballooning. According to Live Science, spiders can fly hundreds of miles on their silken strands. 
Charles Darwin, the 1800s naturalist known for observing the animals of the Galapagos Islands, noticed spiders ballooning far out at sea. I found his observation (trigger alert) thanks to the University of Colorado: “The ship’s rigging was festooned with gossamer, and dusky red spiders were lowering themselves from the rigging to the deck.” 
Darwin suspected that flying spiders might use Earth’s natural electrical field to assist in these journeys. His theory seemed unprovable, so the idea was scrapped until recently. PBS now reports that a researcher has managed to demonstrate that some spiders do coopt Earth’s static electricity to keep them aloft. Spiders know when the air is charged because their tiny leg hairs stand on end. 
The electrical boost allows–don’t panic–larger spiders to surf the winds. Palm-sized Japanese spiders are in the process of invading the United States, but they’re said to be harmless…if you don’t go cardiac.

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Photo by Stanley A. Jashemski, 1973.

I first toured Pompeii in 1973, and being a teen, my only clear memory is of a painting kept locked behind a grate to shield the innocence of children. In the painting, a man weighs his mega-member against a heap of gold on a balance scale.
Interpretation: a man’s organ is more valuable than wealth.
Fifty years later, Pompeii’s 66 acres reveal infinitely more. Much of the city has been unearthed and restored imparting a multitude of archeological feats, history, customs, and culture. The knowledge obtained over those two decades of excavation provides fodder for lifetimes of study.
Still, when I troll for interesting details to share, the seamier stuff is what presents itself. Ancient sailors who visited the port of Pompeii had big plans for their gold. They just needed help to find a bordello. Since most ancients were illiterate, the bordellos embedded carved phalluses into the streets and walls to point the way. Howling was another way to grab the attention of men with a yen because “professional women” were called “lupina,” or female wolves. Inside the bordello, illustrations over the doors helped customers find their desired specialties.
This Mediterranean culture of openness concerning valued body parts apparently continues today—at least in the tourist trade. Nearly every souvenir shop we passed offered an array of decorated phalluses.
The eternal truth? Sex sells!

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Photo by Joan Gilomen

This Santorini Gyro platter — with pita — may be the best food I’ve ever eaten.

Before I learned how to avoid the pitfalls, I learned that taking chances wasn’t worth the indulgence. The rash from even a small serving of glutenous food can bring a month of misery. So, when a couple of gluten free women told me that they were able to eat wheat in Europe without a problem, I wasn’t tempted to try it myself. With the help of a dining staff member, I navigated a three-week eastern European river cruise without so much as sniffing a strudel.
On a recent trip though, I bemoaned the pastries and pizzas I’d snubbed in Italy, and our tour guide told me about a Canadian client with celiacs. He gave in to temptation by trying just a tiny sample of each of the delicacies he’d so craved. When he had no reaction, he went whole hog the rest of the trip. He thought he was cured, but when he returned to Canada, he found that he wasn’t.
I weighed the possibilities and finally tried a morsel of bread at our next meal. No rash. At breakfast, I ate a small pastry without consequence. Woo hoo, I was free! I ate a sandwich on a lovely, fresh bakery bun in Athens, gyros, spanakopita, and baklava in Santorini–even European cookies on the flight home. And all the time I wondered; how can this be?
An internet search showed that this miracle is no secret, but I found no convincing explanations. Yes, Europe does use a softer wheat with less gluten, but I’ve gotten a rash from a mite of gluten in a smallish pill. One “expert” claimed that American gluten problems are caused by preservatives, and Europe has no problems because everything there is fresh. Sounds good, but I ate packaged cookies and baklava without a hint of a hive.

I also read that some people do have trouble with European wheat, so, if you’re gluten free, nibble before you leap.
The final burning question: how soon can I get back to Europe?

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Fountain in downtown Athens

Tour director Rachel recruited my husband Steve to help haul excess luggage across Athens, then treated him to a Metro ride back.

View of Athens from the Acropolis

GoAhead Tour director Rachel strategizing with Steve

She knew that taking the Metro was dicey. During the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009, Greece had no resources to prevent illegal immigrants from flooding in, so Athens was overrun with desperate people, some of whom still struggle to survive. Many have turned to picking pockets, and the subway is an ideal locale for getting hands-on.
After having Rachel point out a few likely candidates, Steve noticed that though pickpockets dress like tourists, they reek of body odor – maybe because they don’t have access to a shower? Some drew suspicion by running up the escalators, probably making a getaway after scoring. So, between those escalator sprints, and the fear of getting caught, it seems likely that even pickpockets who’d bathed would work up a seriously stinky sweat.

A key tell to watch for, according to Rachel, is people’s eyes. Men tend to focus on cleavage, so males taking more interest in men’s hips are likely looking for loot. She noticed one guy motion to another, seeming to indicate Steve’s pants pockets. There she drew the line. No client/volunteer-luggage-handler of Rachel’s would be robbed on her watch. Despite Steve’s protests, she positioned him against a wall next to a safe-looking woman, then planted herself in front of Steve, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. He finished the commute without losing any worldly goods, but pride slightly bruised. He didn’t realize that Rachel’s guardianship had been sent by the deity Athens is named for. Opa, Steve was blessed by Athena, goddess of wisdom and protection!

Athena, goddess of wisdom and protection. Photo from Wikimedia.org

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The famed Grecian islands of Santorini gets only a few rains each year. The islands’ traditional roofs are arched to shed water into drainage spouts that

collect the runoff. Still, almost all the islanders’ freshwater must be shipped in. So how do Santorinians grow enough grapes to support a notable wine industry?

Photo from Santorini.net

Layers of pumice

Pumice.

Back in the bronze age, a megaton volcano blew Santorini apart so violently that her ash cloud blanketed the Earth. Fallout from that cloud buried what was left of Santorini in a mega layer of pumice.

Pumice is so porous that it scrapes humidity out of sea air and holds it like a sponge. The rock can protect its hoard against evaporation, but not a grape root worming its way into pumice’s hiding places and sipping droplets.

Santorini vineyard

Even with adequate water, life is harsh on a bed of hot rock. Santorini vine tenders help the vines flourish by training them into coiled wreaths which help shade developing grapes.
Thanks to pumice and ingenuity, Santorini offers more wine than water…or so I’ve heard.

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High in the Sawtooth Mountains, my Molly mutt charged into a small valley. Through the trees, I glimpsed the creature she’d spotted. It was a little bigger than Molly, dark, and slow. Bear cub? The glance I’d gotten had left a calf shaped impression, but rough-cut, like a Gumby character. Bear or bovine, that critter’s mama was not going to stand for this. I shouted with little hope. I knew that Molly was too excited to hear me, and that my lumbering pace would make me a fine target for that mama’s wrath.

This sort of situation is one of many off-leash hazards that make me a firm believer in keeping dogs hooked up. Still, I’m weak. A dog’s unfettered joy is infectious, and three-year-old Molly spends too much time stuck in the truck or camper or tied in our campsite. She needs way more exercise than an arthritic 60-something can provide from the end of a leash.

Back in the valley, I thought about turning tail and leaving Molly to find me, but I knew that if she didn’t, I would suffer long and hard wondering what happened to her and whether my staying might have helped her. I kept moving into the valley and calling.

When Molly finally returned, she was fine, no injuries, blood, or mad mama on her tail. I leashed her and headed out of that valley as fast as my knees allowed. As we climbed, I spotted a moose with twin calves traversing the slope above us. Ah, now the oddly shaped calf impression made sense. Molly, it seemed, had fancied herself a mighty moose hunter. I prayed that this mama was not one to hold a grudge. In general, Moose weigh a thousand pounds or more, and if this one decided to knock me down and stomp me, my husband would take delivery of a grizzly corpse.
The moose trio reached the top of the ridge well before us, and Mama stood her ground watching Molly and me. The trail, which I’d carefully marked to keep from getting lost, would take me dangerously close to where Mama stood. Instead, we retreated down the trail and waited for Mama to move on. She didn’t.

“Okay, okay, it’s your ridge, and your valley. We’ll just take this other track and hope to find our camp.” We eventually met the main road, a hot, dusty internal combustion domain, no safer than skirting an angry moose. Our next few days’ walks led away from both those perils, on leash.

The following week, on another mountain, I was grateful that Molly was leashed when she scared up a small spotted fawn within pouncing distance. Molly has learned not to yank the leash in trying to nab critters, but a fawn jumping up under her nose was too much to resist. When Molly hit the end of the leash, the whiplash threatened to cripple me. We walked off her disappointment in a matter of seconds and my pains in a mile or so.

Photo from Yosemite National Park website

Our side trail petered out, so we backtracked to the main trail, continued up it for a bit, then headed for camp. Barely visible in the undergrowth beside the trail was a baby fawn sagging and panting as if on his last leg. Molly didn’t notice, and I passed as quickly as possible to keep from stressing him further. When I turned to take a quick pic, I saw the baby lower his hindquarters, making me suppose that he hadn’t been sagging with exhaustion but crouching, ready to run again. In any case, I hope his mama found him and moved him further from the trail.

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Lily Payton Womack

      My Aunt Lily was wonderfully friendly and fun. She lived in San Jose, California, so even though we Coloradans didn’t see much of her, I felt like I knew her well. When our daughters attended West Coast colleges, I sent them to meet Aunt Lily, and they agreed that Lily was a “cool aunt.” I will always appreciate Lily’s kindness to me and my girls, as well as her help with the book No Market for ‘Em which is excerpted below. Lily’s wholehearted enthusiasm over my first book also encouraged me to follow through on the next. I wish she’d been up to reading the newest release. That effort (Mile High Lab Rat) shows considerable growth, thanks in part to her encouragement.
    Lily Marie Payton Womack was born December 30, 1923, in Norton, Kansas and outlived all of her seven siblings. She passed away on February 28th, 2022, at the age of 98 in Livermore, California. Her family returned her ashes to the Rose Hill Cemetery plot she purchased beside her sister and brother in Rifle, Colorado. The memories of Lily that I collected in No Market for ‘Em feel meagre given her vibrant 98-year lifespan. I hope her friends and family will add more in the comments.

LILY’S MEMORIES FROM NO MARKET FOR ‘EM:

      In December of 1928, while the Depression tightened its chokehold on Europe, Mom and Dad put a thousand dollars down on eighty-eight acres near Mont Ida, Kansas. I’m not sure if Dad’s crop failed or just what, but money was scarce when Christmas came the next year. Fred remembered Mom and Madge trying to convince Lily that Santa Claus wouldn’t know where we’d moved, so she shouldn’t expect the pretty doll he was supposed to bring. Lily was six, a bright little blonde, and she wasn’t about to give up on her doll.
      She said, “Santa knows everything.” Her only worry was that her stocking might not be big enough, but she decided that if the doll was too big to fit in the stocking, Santa could leave Dolly on the floor.
      No mother ever loved her brood more than Mom did us, so you know that if there’d been a way to come up with a doll, she’d have done it. The next morning Fred saw tears in her eyes when Lily didn’t find a doll in the stocking or on the floor.

                                                                                                                                                       ~

      Later, Dad lost the farm and when the sheriff’s sale was done, we had nothing but a 1927 Model T Ford and fifty dollars in the pocket of my dad’s overalls. We left my pal Tony, the greyhound, at the neighbor’s place and headed for western Colorado. Lily remembers staying in a dingy upstairs boarding room where they locked us in at night. Then again, maybe they didn’t lock us in. Maybe it was the folks locking the door that scared Lily. She’d never seen anyone lock a door in her life, so a place where you needed to lock the door had to be dangerous.

Dale, Lily, Wayne inside with dog, Norman with cat, Fred, Dorothy, and Marge

                                                                                                                                                    ~

      Our clothes, mostly overalls, were well-worn hand-me-downs. I went barefoot as much as I could because my shoes didn’t fit. I have long feet and had to cram my toes in as best I could. They’re still scrunched out of shape seventy years later. I guess I should be glad I didn’t have to wear the old-fashioned high-topped girl’s shoes that someone gave Mom. She felt bad that Lily had to wear them, but Lily loved them.

                                                                                                                                                   ~

      Taking care of Grandma had to be about the last straw for Mom, but Dale remembered her holding Grandma’s hand and crying when Clarissa was very sick. Lily remembers the doctor coming to declare Grandma deceased. It was the one time Lily saw Dad cry. All I remember was him telling us, “Take a good look. It’s the last time you’ll see her.”
     When she was gone, Dad’s younger brother, Roy, a successful lawyer from Pueblo, came and brought a box of oranges. Lily thought they tasted so good that she even ate the peels.
      Aunt Katie came to visit, too. She’d started teaching school at sixteen and then gone on to normal school which was a short course for teachers but then switched to business college. She told us, “You kiddies must get an education,” so many times that it’s been stuck in Lily’s head for almost eighty years.

                                                                                                                                                   ~

      I don’t know if the school ever sent me to the Salvation Army for lunch, but Lily says she went. Lily hasn’t been hungry—unless she was dieting—for over half a century. She’s looked like a million bucks every day for close to that long, and her house in San Jose is worth over that, but she still gets ecstatic over the taste of that Salvation Army soup. Someone apparently sponsored a milk program too. Every day around eleven, a milkman would bring milk to the back of Lily’s classroom for the kids who couldn’t afford it. In other parts of the country, people were pouring surplus milk out on the ground to keep prices up.
      The eight of us gave Mom so many worries, you’d have thought she’d never have enough time to fit them all in, but she got an amazing amount done. She worried that with all of us kids coming so close together, we didn’t get enough attention. None of us got anywhere near the kind of attention she’d gotten as a child, but she especially worried about Norman because Lily, a year and a half older, was a “fragile baby”. Lily has always been afraid of almost anything that casts a shadow, so it’s hard to say whether she really was sickly or just scared half to death. Mom didn’t know what was wrong, but she kept Lily calmed by cuddling the little girl in her apron top and working with the other hand. She was still fussing over Lily when Norman came, and while he was waiting his turn, I barged in and kicked him out of the crib.

                                                                                                                                                 ~

      Dad planted watermelon and cantaloupe on the Kister land. His cantaloupes were fine, but his watermelons grew great big and beautiful. When they started to ripen, he built a fruit stand that Lily remembers having to sit in all day waiting for customers. Sometimes Dad would find the chewed rinds and seeds in his fields. The kids from town got a kick out of stealing melons, but it was only a few, and he didn’t mind their having some fun.
      We boys got some rabbits somewhere and cobbled together some hutches for them. We cut grass to feed them and made sure they had water. They did the rest. The bumper crop they produced made us proud, and we were looking forward to fried rabbit and profitable pelts when dogs broke in and killed them all.
      The family raised chickens too. Mom and Dad would dress (gut) and pluck the plump ones in the evenings to sell to a hotel. If there were extras, Dad would drive down an alley, and Lily and Dorothy would each take a side, knocking on backdoors of houses and asking, “would you like to buy a dressed chicken?” The humiliation about killed Lily.

                                                                                                                                            ~

      Up near the Highline Canal northeast of Fruitvale we found an abandoned field of gooseberries and currants. The whole family rode up in Dad’s wagon, and we stuffed ourselves on the sweet purple gooseberries. Then we filled our buckets and took them home for pies.
      We got a cow and laying hens too, so we had eggs and milk. Mom made deviled eggs and wrapped them in newspaper for us to take for lunch. Lily was mortified when she opened her locker, and the eggy smell that gusted up and down the hall. Still, it was better than another bean sandwich.

                                                                                                                                          ~

      After our older sisters left home, Mom shouldered the heavy housekeeping chores like hauling water in to do laundry on the scrub board, so Lily didn’t have it as bad as she might have. She did have to come home every day after school and build a fire and peel potatoes. After supper she washed the dishes, and she admits that when we lived at Fruitvale, she’d sneak the dishes out and wash them in the irrigation ditch. By the time we got to Loma, she was back to hauling the water into our already hot-as-blazes kitchen, stoking up the fire to get the water hot, and then sweating over the dishpan.

      Hard work and uncomfortable conditions were probably the least of it for all of us. Lily was out in the yard one summer in a dress so worn it had holes in it. She didn’t hear the car coming down the lane behind her, or she’d have gotten out of sight. As it was, she got caught in that rag of a dress, and the driver turned out to be Dad’s cousin, a county agent from Salina. Lily was horrified to have a Kansas relation see us in such sorry straights, and when the cousin tracked Dad down, she felt even worse for Dad.

      That was probably one of the few situations when Lily didn’t enjoy being social. It really hurt her that she couldn’t go to ballgames or join clubs after school because she had to catch the bus. Once in a while Dad would let Dale drive her and Norman to the football games Norman played in. Sometimes too, she’d get to spend the night with a girlfriend in town, and they would go out with a couple boys on the sly. At home Dad had a knack for heading the guys off before they even got to the house. He told them she was too young. She was seventeen, but, pretty and friendly as she was, you couldn’t blame him for worrying about his fragile baby girl. I don’t know when—or if—he planned to let her date. The situation hadn’t come up with any of the rest of us.
When she graduated, the folks were too self-conscious about their clothes to go to anything like that, so Lily went alone. The ceremony ended late, and rather than walk home in the dark, Lily spent the night with a friend. She didn’t have a way to let us know what had become of her, and Dad was so furious by the time she got home, he raked her over the coals.

Lily’s graduation picture

      She knew that Madge had sent a graduation gift and hoped for a watch. All the girls were getting watches. But the gift was a suitcase, and when Dad saw it, he said, “You’d just as well put your clothes in it and leave.” I don’t suppose he really meant it, but that’s what Lily did. She and Mom went to the employment office the next day.

      Lily says, “I thought ‘Hey I can get a job because I graduated high school.’ How dumb can you be?” In 1999, Tom Brokaw would call us the “Greatest Generation” but in the prewar, no-market-for-us years, we felt more like the junk heap generation.

      Someone at the employment office overheard Lily’s problems with finding a job and told her to sign up with the National Youth Administration. The NYA was similar to the WPA except that they accepted men and women sixteen to twenty-five. Richard Nixon worked for thirty-five cents an hour for the NYA in North Carolina. Lyndon Johnson in Texas got on too. The NYA accepted Lily that same day and placed her in a house on Grand with other young women in the program. They bussed her to a canning factory in the Redlands near the Colorado Monument for a time then placed her in the laundry at the Colorado General Hospital in Denver for three months through the winter. She folded sheets she took from a big mangle that dried and ironed the linens by running them through heavy, heated rollers. To round out her training she worked as a waitress at the Grand Junction railroad depot. Those skills landed her a real job at Carol’s restaurant in Delta.

      Lily kept her distance after she moved out because she knew Dad was mad, and the truth was that putting Loma behind her was such a relief, she didn’t miss anything about it—not even us. It took six weeks, but Dad showed up in the driveway on Grand one day and said, “We haven’t heard from you. We wondered how you were doing.”
      And that patched it up.

      After World War II started, Lily’s school friend Mae called and said they ought to go to San Francisco to work in the shipyards. Anyone could work there and make real money. Better yet, Mae had a sister and brother-in-law there that Lily and Mae could live with.
      The girls got on with Prefab in Shipyard #2 in 1943, building pieces of ships to be stuck in when the main builders were ready for them. Lily and Mae became tinners (sheet metal workers) assembling ship galleys with screws—not rivets. Rosie the Riveter assembled airplanes, so the shipbuilders tried to draw their own crowd with Wendy the Welder. She never caught on like Rosie.
      Lily and Mae the Tinners went to school and became journeymen, but Lily would be the first to tell you not to put any stock in her title. The shipbuilding companies didn’t take time to fully train emergency war workers. Following the all-new assembly line model, trainers only showed each worker what she needed to know to do a small part of the job, like “put this screw in this hole.” The next girl down the line did the next step and so on. The line was so efficient that Lily’s crew had nothing to do but sit and play cards for three months at a time. There were no layoffs because Uncle Sam’s ships were built on a cost-plus basis, and the more people Prefab hired, the more the contractor made. Lily was disgusted to see the shipyards padding their profits, but she pulled down sixty-three dollars for a forty-eight-hour workweek, and she didn’t see that telling Prefab to keep their paycheck would help anything.
      On her second night in Richmond, she met an Okie named Lloyd Womack. That’s another thing she thinks is terrible—calling people Okies. Oklahomans took a lot of ribbing about being poor, ignorant, barefoot yokels, and she didn’t like to see people put down that way, especially Lloyd. Lloyd was up and coming. He worked sheet metal too. It didn’t take long for him to be promoted to Lead Man, which put his salary up to sixty-nine a week. He was so friendly and down to earth; she went with him for a year and tied the knot. Lily was determined not to ever go back to living the way we did as kids, so right off the bat, she set their sights, “I want a house, and I want it paid for.” They got a little studio government apartment in Richmond and started socking those paychecks away.

Arthur (Lily’s father) Lily, and Madge in California

      Lloyd got his induction papers on March 11, 1944, the day they got married. He went in for his physical, and six doctors looked at their part and passed him down the line. The seventh one asked if there was anything that would keep Lloyd from serving. Lloyd said he’d hurt his ankle playing ball, and it still wasn’t right. The doctor sent him for an x-ray, and it must have shown a problem. Lloyd never got called back, but for some reason, he never got a 4-F rating (not fit to serve) either.
      Getting to spend time with Lily and meet her new husband was a great treat for the folks, but the way Lloyd treated Lily, spoiled it. He was friendly to us, and he was always good to me, but he’d get awfully gruff with her and anyone else he decided needed straightening out. Mom expected that he’d be a poor husband but a good provider, and Lily says that’s just how it was. She never wanted for anything but respect and affection.

      After the war Lily stayed home with her one baby—soon to be two. When she and Lloyd got laid off from their shipyard jobs, he got on making cars in a Ford plant in Richmond. Later he went to work as a pipe fitter for Standard Oil, and they had a good start on the “paid for” house Lily had ordered.

                                                                                                                                                      ~

      Around 1958, Lloyd took time out from running his filling station in Half Moon Bay to bring Lily and their two boys, Ronald and Richard, to see the folks. We had a big reunion picnic under the apple trees up Parachute Creek.

      After Norman’s wife left him, he lived with Lily and Lloyd for four months and worked in their gas station while he got established in California. They took Fred in too for a few months before he died of cancer.

Warren, Dale, Lily, Norman, Dorothy, Wayne

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Wild turkeys outside Parachute, Colorado

Sometimes my family hangs around with a bunch of turkeys. I was lucky enough to get a nice shot of them, or at least one with a background I love. It seems strange to me that these gobblers are black. As a kid I learned turkey anatomy by way of art projects featuring a tail of brightly colored feathers. I’ve never seen a turkey with a tail like that, but then I’ve seen few turkeys–none of them very close. I only started siting the big birds around our family’s western Colorado ranch in the last couple decades, probably because turkeys have been working their way back from near extinction since the early 1900s.

Iridescent turkey photo by Courtney Celley, USFWS

Anyway, maybe the turkey’s colorful reputation originated with the iridescent glow of their non-tail feathers. Whether that coloring migrated to the tail in children’s art projects because of creativity or confusion, I can’t say, but somebody ought to tell teachers that they are misleading students who’ve never met a turkey…other than the human variety.

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