My Take
DiVoran Lites
As told to DiVoran Lites by Dora Bowers
Canon City, Colorado, 1941
Photo credit Pixabay
It was almost time for my second child to be born. Back then, we didn’t have an ultrasound and so had no idea what gender the child crowding my womb would turn out to be. The doctor checked me out and said the baby seemed to be in a breech position. That was a bad thing, but fortunately, Dr. Perry had delivered hundreds of babies. I was listening to the song, “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” on the radio when my water broke. It was time to go to the hospital, but because I didn’t want to spend as many hours there as I did with DiVoran’s birth, I put off the trip. Dr. Perry barely had time to turn the child so that he came out feet first. David Allen Bowers was born at St. Thomas Moore Hospital on June 14, 1941, in Canon City, Colorado. Flag Day.
I remember the first time I kissed our baby’s cheek. His skin felt like silk velvet. It smelled clean and new and was such a wonderful experience that I never forgot it.
For a time my mother Mabel and Ivan’s mother Marie scheduled themselves to help with the two children and the household one at a time. Ivan, tired and dirty from working at the gas plant, had no energy to help. DiVoran, aged three did her part by patting David in his crib and singing to him over and over, “Baby go night-night.”
Just as I prayed he would, David “grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man”. (Luke 2:52)
We four moved to Crowley where Dad got a job at a tomato factory keeping the machinery running. There, we lived in part of a section house with a small yard and a railroad track behind us. We raised chickens and had a nanny goat who had just had her baby too. The milk was good for all three of the kids.
The house had a front door and a back door, but there were no doors on the inside. We had to go out one door and walk to the back or front of the house and go in the other door. In desperation, Ivan knocked a hole in the wall between our bedroom and the kids’ room so we could reach through to tend to baby David in his crib. Finally, Ivan decided to cut interior doors so we could go from room to room without going outside. That was a relief!
When David was big enough (or so I thought) we swam in the retaining pond near our house. I suspended David from an inner tube by his arms and he hung there kicking his tiny feet and enjoying the cool water. When I looked away for a second his inner tube had upended, and all I could see was his bottom and his feet sticking up. When I rescued him he coughed and spluttered but thank the Good Lord he was fine.
It was my job to feed the tomato harvesters three big meals a day. The oven leaked ashes that peppered the homemade pies, but the men were so hungry they never seemed to notice. The big boss came for his meals when they left for the field or if the workday was over going to their rooms in the section house, or maybe down to the bars if it was payday.
Knowing it was important for children to have fresh air and sunshine, I put them outside in the small fenced playground their daddy made for them and they played happily in the sandbox and on the low swing. DiVoran was big enough by this time to look after her brother. Whenever a train went by they ran to the fence and waved to the conductor who always waved back from the caboose and sometimes the engineer blew the whistle for them.
DiVoran has been writing for most of her life. Her first attempt at a story was when she was seven years old and her mother got a new typewriter. DiVoran got to use it and when her dad saw her writing he asked what she was writing about. DiVoran answered that she was writing the story of her life. Her dad’s only comment was, “Well, it’s going to be a very short story.” After most of a lifetime of writing and helping other writers, DiVoran finally launched her own dream which was to write a novel of her own. She now has her Florida Springs trilogy and her novel, a Christian Western Romance, Go West available on Amazon. When speaking about her road to publication, she gives thanks to the Lord for all the people who helped her grow and learn. She says, “I could never have done it by myself, but when I got going everything fell beautifully into place, and I was glad I had started on my dream.”
Old Things R New 
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