My Take
DiVoran Lites
Nerds of the World Unite.
At eight fifty in the morning
Before the Library Opens
People gather silently, one by one,
To stand and wait:
Man in tee-shirt, woman in pony tail,
Care giver in scrubs,
Grandfather and child.
Let us ring around the rosy and be merry,
“Here we stand like birds in the wilderness,
Waiting for our food.”
Reblogged from Rebekah Lyn Books
Beloved,
Look what is happening! A great delight has come into your life. Once you lived in a shadowed land. Now you have a light to guide you. You have a right to ask for help. You have the amazing counselor, the one and only God, the loving Father, the Prince of Peace, the host of wholeness living inside of you. Angel armies hover all around taking care of you. You no longer have any need to worry. I have made my home in your life. From here, we go along together, forever.
Your heavenly Father,
His Banner Over Me is Love
My Take
DiVoran Lites
According to legend the explorer Ponce de Leon discovered the Fountain of Youth as a spring near what is now DeLand, Florida. Each day a million gallons of water surge from deep caverns, fill the pool and make a wide stream that runs into the St. Johns River. DeLeon believed that if you swam in the spring you would live forever. It may be true, although DeLeon only lived to age 45, Bill and I are still kickin’ and my mother, who swam in it when she was eighty lived to be ninety. She took great joy in believing, even though she didn’t particularly want to live forever, which is probably wise.
I’m so fond of that place that I decided to use it for the setting of my first novel, “Sacred Spring.” It is a place which is full of history.
This year we decided to go to the Old Mill Pancake house for our special Christmas. We customers sit at long tables. Each table has a griddle in the middle upon which to cook pancakes and eggs. The waitress brings crisp bacon and savory sausage. It’s hard to choose from the half dozen syrups. Everything tastes as delicious as ever.
We have six members of the immediate family and sorely miss the other two of our immediate family of eight. We talk and laugh about things that had happened over the decades and told family stories that our 27-year-old grandson has never heard. He and his uncle had a brief discussion about computers since both are involved in them at work. Too soon we feel we should give up our table for the many people who are crowding in at the door.
What should we do now? Our son’s choice is a four-mile hike. That will be puny for him and overwhelming for me. Fortunately, it is still cold and a light rain falls. Outside, we stand under an eave and talk about trying to find a place where we can sit and talk…maybe a mall with tables somewhere. We couldn’t come up with anything so we get in our cars and head south. We are an hour and fifteen minutes away from our home and a bit more for our daughter and her husband. Our son’s house is half an hour from where we were. As we tootle along I have a serendipitous thought. Why not go there? I call him and he says, “Yes, do come to my house.” I call the car behind us, and our daughter said they could come too.
When we walk in it is sad to realize once again that those two are not with us as they have been for so many years. Somebody wants coffee and the coffee choices appear. Some want hot chocolate which is hard to find ingredients for. Finally, they appear tiny-mini chocolate chips, milk, cardamom and cinnamon and leftover syrup from Cracker-Barrel. I tend the increasingly chocolate milk spoon a sample and sigh. Just right!
Our host asks if we’d like to have a fire in the fire-place…lovely thing for a sharp-aired, rainy day. The flicker of the fire and the smell of the burning wood remind us of camping trips of old. The ancient red dog of our grandchildren’s childhood follows us wherever we go. No-one turns on a TV or sits down to hide behind their phones. The daughter fiddles with getting the best picture with the finest background possible.
And now it is time to call the away ones…our grand-daughter and her mother who complete our circle. Both work currently in what to us are far away places. Son made the conference call and all eight of us had time together as we have for so many years. It was wonderful to talk with them. Finally, it was time to get in our cars and head on down south.
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.”
My Take
DiVoran Lites
In 1945 after fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and when the horror of liberating several concentration camps with their piles of emaciated corpses was over, Ivan came home. He was so glad to see his family. He said that throughout the fighting, most soldiers thought for sure they’d die on the front and never make it home at all. But though many, many of them did die, quite a few came back. Jobs were scarce. We had to look around for a way to make a living; so when the opportunity to buy Min’s Café in Westcliffe came up, we bought it.
We worked hard in that restaurant. Dave and DiVoran learned to work too. We all did some table waiting, and the kids washed tons of dishes as did everybody else. Dave was in charge of carrying wooden pop cases. He brought in the full ones from the garage where they’d been unloaded and brought them back out empty for the delivery truck from Canon City or Pueblo to bring back full again, and we always told him it was a good way to build muscles.
One day, Ivan took the kids to buy a puppy from a farmer. They paid thirty-five cents for him, which was all they had kept from their small wages. They named him Brownie. He was a mixed breed, mostly sheep-herder. He was a good dog. When it came to looking after the kids, he took his shepherd duties seriously.
Shepard Brownie
The kid’s Dad also bought them a Shetland pony who was already 23 years old. His name was Yankee and he was wise in the way of children. When Dave was learning to ride, he fell off a few times, but as soon as Yankee felt him leave the saddle, he stopped and waited for him to get back on. DiVoran was treated differently. The minute she settled in the saddle, Yankee took off running full tilt for his feedlot with DiVoran hanging onto the saddle horn and screaming all the way. Her Dad soon put a stop to that by instructing her in the fine art of being the boss with a horse.
Yankee and the boss
When the kids got older and better at riding, we got two bigger horses—Dixie and Derby. These two were used for hunting and fishing trips into the mountains with Ivan as guide, but the kids rode them for fun too. They liked to play rodeo out at the rodeo grounds on the horses. Dixie taught Dave how to fly by throwing him 27 times. He spent so much time in the air that when he grew up he felt right at home as an airline pilot.
Besides being a lot of work, Westcliffe was fun for all of us. It was a town of about 320 people and the kids were favorites with the other storekeepers on the one block main street. They liked to pop into the drugstore and see if the pharmacist, Cope had any comic books with the covers torn off. He did that to get a refund of the ones that hadn’t sold. Other children in the town got stacks of them too.
We were finally home.
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.”
My Take
DiVoran Lites
WW2 wives of Canon City
Dora is the second person standing far left. The first woman on the left standing at the back is my sister-in-law Geneva from Kentucky.
During World War Two while our men were overseas, we had to use ration stamps for food. Sugar was scarce and pineapple was totally unavailable. That’s why no matter where my kitchen is I keep a can of pineapple in the cupboard. Whenever I open a new can I serve pineapple and cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf. Delicious…and available!
When we got our army allotment, we stuck $3.00 in the piggy bank for our pleasures for the month. Sunday morning we walked to church and on Sunday afternoon, we walked downtown to the show, which is now called a movie theater
On summer Sundays we went to the park across from the prison for band concerts by the prisoners. When the “Star-Spangled Banner” began, DiVoran trained Dave in patriotism by snatching him up by the seat of his pants and instructing: “Tand up, Tar Pangle!!” Stand up it’s the Star-Spangled Banner.
In the winter we put on heavy coats and went downtown to see a movie. We didn’t watch what DiVoran called myrtle mysteries because I didn’t want my children to grow up scared by crime stories. As we walked home, Dave’s two-year-old legs got tired so he held his arms up and said, “Me carry you.” He was quite the bundle swathed in his homemade winter jacket.
Because everything was rationed, Grandmother Marie and I got out the clothes that had been put away in the garage attic and cut them up to make clothes for the children. DiVoran got tired of standing for us to pin up hems so one day she grabbed the neck of the dress I was pinning and tore it all the way to the waist. That fabric had apparently been in the attic a bit too long. She turned and ran up the stairs because she knew from my shocked expression that she was in trouble.
The children’s feet grew so fast they needed shoes every two months, so Grandmother, Granddad, and Dora limited themselves to one pair of shoes each for the duration of the war in order to have the ration stamps for the children’s’ shoes.
Ivan wrote to me from basic training in Texas and I wrote back almost every day. Letters home were free for the men. Ivan always wrote FREE in the place where the stamps belonged so everyone would know he wasn’t trying to get away with anything. My stamps cost 3 cents each. It added up. We also had the option of buying War Bonds which were an investment that would someday pay off.
Most of my friends were women whose men were in the military. There were many rules about sending letters, the most obvious one was to not mention anything that would give the enemy an advantage such as telling where the letters were posted from. Censors made sure by either blocking or cutting out anything they thought spies might use against us.
Ivan and camera in Germany
I saved Ivan’s letters in the shoebox they sent his clothes home in. By the end of the war, the box was jam-packed full. He, on the other hand, couldn’t save any of my letters because he had no place to put them. He even sent me his small government-issued New Testament with Psalms Bible because he didn’t have any place to carry it. I wore that Bible out. I don’t know what I would have done without it. I knew it was the place to go for comfort. When I was six years old my Grandmother, Florenda Jane Bedell came to visit us in Canon City. She knelt by my bed every night and prayed for me to believe in Jesus and his atonement for my sins. I did that then and He was my savior and hope from then on.
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.”
My Take
DiVoran Lites
Reclaiming the Lost Art of Biblical Meditation by Robert J. Morgan is wonderful as it leads me through the Bible and shows me how to get the most out of pondering, personalizing, and practicing what I read. This morning I started on a down-loadable study guide. After a while, I took a break to go see if my cat, Thea wanted to come in off the porch. I looked everywhere on the small porch but couldn’t find her. I went into prayer mode.
Lord, I can’t find my beautiful cat, Thea. I let her out on the porch about six o’clock this morning. I went back later and called to her, but she didn’t come, so I thought she didn’t want to come in. Lord, I can’t find her anywhere. I’ve shaken the treats bag so that she could hear it and be enticed, but she didn’t come. I’ve looked in about every nook and cranny, and she’s nowhere to be found. It’s almost as if someone quietly slipped onto the screened porch and kidnapped her.
Maybe someone did that with the golden cat that used to greet me and ask to be petted when I took my walk. He has been gone for a couple of weeks now. There’s a man our son’s age who lives up the street who misses the golden cat too. What a sweet and beautiful animal. The thought occurs…perhaps someone is stealing the prettiest cats in the neighborhood to sell.
Oh, was that a cat I just heard? I put on my hoodie and hurried outside through the porch door. I walked around the house, but saw no cat of any kind. But when I came back in Thea must have heard me because she flashed out of hiding. Apparently, she had been sleeping soundly in a chair pushed under the tablecloth. I didn’t think to look there. When I came in she thought I had some greens for her to chew on so she woke up and came out of her cozy, warm place. I had no greens, but I’ve planted some for her. Thea means a lot to both of us. If she had indeed been gone, I would have missed her terribly.
As I go back to the verses I am reading, pondering and writing down. I sense that God speaking to me through His word and through the Holy Spirit.
Beloved, you did well in your scare with Thea’s disappearance.
You eventually started to bring your mind away from anxiety and panic and into my presence.
Just think how quickly Thea appeared when you thanked Me for the situation.
Lord, are you telling me that the manifestation of an answer comes more quickly when we thank you than when we are anxious?
Don’t be pulled in different directions or worried about a thing. Be saturated in prayer throughout each day, offering faith-filled requests and sharing the details of your life with me.
This is the way to peace and peace is the state of mind and heart that brings the answers to prayer.
It’s a process. Learn to make your way through it so that you may live a life that is:
Philippians 4, Paraphrase, The Passion Translation
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.”
My Take
DiVoran Lites
Crowley, Colorado 1942-43
Around the time that David learned to walk well, we had a Mama goat named Petaluma and a baby goat named Billy. We also had a dog named ginger and a black cat. Sometimes in the afternoon between washing and drying dinner dishes and starting supper, we all walked along beside the irrigation ditch to the factory to see Ivan. For some reason, we always fell into a line, maybe according to whose legs were longest. First came Dode (which was me) then Doo Doo (which was the only way David could say DiVoran’s name) then David who we called Dab because of the letters of his name: David Allen Bowers.
Then came Billy the little goat. Billy liked to detour, his divided hooves clicking over the glass which covered the new tomato plants. He stepped so daintily, he never cracked a single pane. After Billy-goat came Ginger the Heinz 57 dog with short forays to check out rabbit smells, and then the cat, always alert for field mice. Momma goat, Petaluma never went along and she wouldn’t tell me why. I suspected it was because she wanted some time to herself, or maybe I thought that because I was in tune with mamas needing just that.
Chanticleer the banty rooster was another member of the family that didn’t go along on the walk. He was a cocky and colorful little character, but he had a bad sense of timing. Day and night trains carrying troops and equipment for the war came down the railroad tracks behind our house. At night, when it was dark, Chanticleer couldn’t tell the difference between light from the streamliner and light from the rising sun. Whenever Chanticleer saw the light, he crowed, even if it was only 3:00 a. m. The noise would wake us and all the hard-working neighbors out of a well-earned night’s sleep. Chanticleer had to go.
He ended up in the pot, but no matter how long we stewed him (and we even served noodles with him) he turned out to be awfully hard to chew and for a while, we lost our taste for chicken. DiVoran’s tears when she guessed what we were trying to eat.
There in Crowley, we had young friends with children the age of ours, so Dave and DiVoran had playmates. We wives cleaned our houses on Friday then raced to see who could get to the other’s house first so their own would not be messed up with the children’s play.
In 1943, when Dave was two and DiVoran 5, more and more countries became involved with the war. In the United States, some men were being drafted and others volunteered for service. Although deferments were usually given to men with small children; as well as to men who produced and preserved food, Ivan felt he must at least go down to the draft office and see if they needed him. They needed him—even though he worked in a canning factory, had small children and even flat feet. “By that time in the war all they required was a man with warm blood.”
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.”
My Take
DiVoran Lites
By Dora Bowers as told to DiVoran Lites
Crowley Colorado, 1942
Circa early 40s Dora, DiVoran, Ivan, and David Bowers
In the time of writers like Lloyd C. Douglas who wrote The Robe, and C. S. Lewis…The Screwtape Letters. WW2 was heating up. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor triggering an outrage of fear so heavy that President Roosevelt decided to send families of over 117,000 Japanese Americans, many of them American citizens, to internment camps in order to pacify the millions of Americans who were afraid that if left free the Japanese would spy for the enemy.
Not long before the big, “Amache,” Internment camp was built near Crowley, Colorado where the Bowers family lived, Japanese people arrived and were housed in section housing. One family moved in next door to the Bowers family on the outskirts of town.
The father was about the same size as Ivan, which was small for a man. He had dark shiny hair and a sweet smile. He always bowed low as he left to go to work (gratis) in the sugarcane field and returned in the evening. For this family bathing together was the highlight of their life. Their bathhouse was practically under our bedroom window. Night after night, I fell asleep to the sound of soft voices and laugher, a pleasant memory from our time in Crowley.
On the few occasions when our Japanese neighbors visited us, they brought gifts of thoroughly cleaned vegetables from their garden. As they arrived, they removed their thong shoes by the front door. They were good, kind neighbors and in spite of the war between our two countries, we liked them and enjoyed getting to know a few of their traditions.
If you are squeamish, please don’t read the next two paragraphs.
Most regular folk in those days kept chickens for their eggs and for the pot. Being chicken people, we were interested in Japanese methods of preparing them for supper. They selected a chicken, hung it upside down from a branch, and pierced the roof of its mouth so the blood could drain out. They could tell that the chicken’s insides were dry when its feathers turned down.
Our way was to wring a chicken’s neck or cut its head off with an ax. If the headless chicken got loose, it ran around in circles until it dropped. From such necessities came sayings such as, “I’m so mad, I could wring his neck” and “running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Once the camps were finished the internees built model communities with schools, health clinics, and, libraries. We were sorry to hear later that the Japanese families who had lived in camps for three years had been cheated out of their houses, cars, and businesses. Many suffered separation, poverty, and sometimes people just disappeared. It has been considered one of the most atrocious violations of American civil rights in the 20th century.
The internment camps lasted from 1942-1945 when the Japanese Americans were finally released to start all over again from scratch and the camps were eventually torn down.
Dorothea Lange censored photographs.
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.”
My Take
DiVoran Lites
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 