(Letty, Douglas, and Stephen with their other friends have decided to investigate the mysterious brownies…)
It took the two girls merely fifteen minutes, exploring the first three gaps in the sagging wire and the wandering trails beyond, beaten into the hard summer earth.
“They went this way,” Letty announced with confidence. Yes, there they were – the straight tracks of narrow wheels, and the footprints of someone whose’ shoes were about the same size as Letty’s were marked in the pale dust between patches of low-growing weeds. “Towards the old Sheffield place. I wonder if …” She left that thought unfinished, and Retta finished it for her.
“They’re camped out in the icehouse? It’s got a roof on it, for sure. If I wanted to stay hidden, and had a place to hide out from everyone, I’d sure as certain consider the icehouse … I wonder how they found it, though.”
“How did they find out that Mrs. Allison goes on the bus to Karnesville and spends the whole day at the hospital?” Letty replied. The two girls walked on silent cat-feet along the narrow beaten path through the thicket of oak trees and scrub brush, brush which covered a low rise above a bend in the San Antonio River – a rise hardly sufficient to be termed a hill. They had nearly reached where the old icehouse had been dug into that hill, when they heard a small child giggling, somewhere hidden by the thick undergrowth. A girl’s voice – startlingly close to them, but unseen, called –
“Coral! Time for your nap! Don’t be a naughty girl, now!”
Retta looked over her shoulder at Letty, who nodded and gestured that they should walk away. The mystery brownies clearly had set up housekeeping in the thickets around the Sheffield ruins, likely taking shelter at night in the ice house. Retta and Letty hurried away, not daring a sound until they had reached the road.
“Well, we shall have something definite to report, now,” Retta commented, wholly satisfied with what they had been able to discover; that it was a real person, and not a familiar household spirit, doing chores at the Allison home. She consulted the alarm clock – which she had carried with her in her little bag of First Aid supplies. Retta wanted to be a nurse when she grew up, and the aid kit accompanied her everywhere. As a Scout, she was always prepared.
They were only a short distance from the club-house; the girls had a shorter distance to cover than the boys, who need travel the farther distance from Luna City. It was a few minutes after four, when Douglas, Artie and Stephen finally appeared, sweaty, breathless and only moderately triumphant.
“They’re living in the icehouse?” Douglas sounded skeptical, and Letty reassured him.
“We followed them almost there – the girl and the baby. They can’t be anywhere else. What did you find out in town?’
“We went everywhere!” Artie was in full, enthusiastic flow. “Looking for strangers who might be kids like us! Even to Abernathy Hardware – every shop along the Square. I think we talked to everyone … Sgt. Drury even asked what we were doing. I told him we were doing a scavenger hunt, and had to get a copy of a newspaper from someplace else. Pretty clever, huh?”
“Yes, but what did you find out?” Letty could hardly contain her impatience. “How did the girl find out about the Allisons … and the old icehouse…”
“There are two boys,” Douglas explained. “They weren’t from around here, everyone is certain about that. Also – the talk different. Almost like city folk, but not quite. One is about my age, maybe a bit older. The other looks to be seven or eight. Everyone we talked to, who noticed the boys says that they’ve seen the older boy running errands and making deliveries for the grocery store. For tips, mostly. And Mr. Mason – that’s the guy who runs it now – he says he don’t bother with asking for a name, since he’s not paying wages. But he lets that boy and his brother pick through the trash and spoiled things that he’s throwing away at the end of the day, ‘cause it’s unfit to sell.”
“Yuck,” Retta made a face. “That’s disgusting.”
“You get hungry enough, you’ll eat what you can that won’t bite back,” Artie pointed out, with feeling. The Vaughns were hard up, everyone in Luna City knew that. Mr. Vaughn, whose little ranch property near Beeville had been foreclosed on at the very start of the crash, made only a pittance as a policeman for the Luna City Police Department – hardly enough to support a wife, Artie and his younger brother Harry. If it weren’t for them keeping hens and a garden out in back of the Vaughn place, and their father regularly going hunting … they’d also be scavenging what they could from the grocery store, like those unnamed boys.
“So, where did they come from?” Letty asked. “Did anyone know that?”
“I went and talked to Manny Gonzalez, at the garage,” Stephen answered. “I thought that he might have seen something, since so many travelers go past his father’s place.”
Manny – or Manolo, was an older teenage boy, who was interested in nothing but engines and mechanical things, to the exclusion of practically everything else. Manny quit school as soon as it was allowed, to work in the Gonzalez family enterprise. This was an auto repair shop on the very edge of town, situated – like the Tip-Top Ice House Gas & Grocery – to take best advantage of travel on the main road between San Antonio, Beeville and Rockport.
“Did he?” Retta demanded, impatiently. “Stop keeping us all in suspense, Douglas – it’s not fair. What did Manny tell you? Did he see the boys? Did he know anything about them.”
“He did, indeed,” Douglas replied, with something of the air of Sherlock Holmes explaining something to Dr. Watson. “He told me that a trucker with a busted brake line and a load he had to get to Brownsville stopped at the shop about six weeks ago … and there were four kids with him. Four kids with an old wagon and a couple of bags and an ‘ol suitcase strapped onto it. The two boys, a girl about eleven or twelve, and another little girl – just about able to walk, Manny says. The littlest had curly blond hair and looked sort of like that cute little girl with the ringlets in the movie shorts – that’s how come Manny took notice. He also noticed that the four kids didn’t stick around, until the trucker got his brakes fixed. When he moved on, the kids weren’t with him. Manny thinks the oldest boy is the one doing errands for the grocery store.”
“If he was hanging around there, looking for work,” Stephen had already made the logical deduction, “Then he might have overheard Mrs. Allison talking to the others, waiting for the Karnesville bus. What are we going to do now, Captain?”
Douglas sounded as if he were thinking out loud. “I really think that we should talk to them. These kids. Find out what’s going on. Why they’re on the road, without any family to look after them. I’ve never heard of kids going on the bum, all alone, ‘cept in the movies. Maybe a boy by himself, looking for work and hitting the road. But with his little sisters? There is something odd and curious about this situation. I think we ought to get to the bottom of it, before we tell anyone else. Tomorrow is Sunday … the bus doesn’t run on Sunday, and the grocery store is closed. I think we ought to go out to the icehouse tomorrow afternoon … after church and talk to these kids. Find out what the story is. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Stephen nodded. “Meet here first, then go all together. And not a word about this to the grownups … until we find out what the story is.”
They all agreed, although Letty saw that Retta hesitated.
Finally, Retta mumbled, “Well … with a baby, who still needs milk… we really ought to tell someone. Someone who really cares. And can do something.”
“We will tell someone, as soon as we know that their story is,” Douglas assured her. It was nearly suppertime – and their mothers would all be irate, if they were late to the table. There was no more time to talk about the matter of the family of children living surreptitiously in the ice house: they headed for home, as speedily as their various means could take them – Douglas and Letty on their bicycles, and Stephen on a spry ranch cowpony. Retta and Artie on foot.

(A snippet from Luna City 12, in progress; a story from when Letty McAllister and Stephen Wyler were children in the 1930s … investigating a case of mysterious visitors to a neighbor in need of help…)

“Who – or what do you think is doing Mrs. Allison’s housekeeping, while she’s away in Karnesville?” Stephen ventured. He wasn’t one for believing in fairy stories either. Douglas considered the matter gravely, before he replied.

“I think that someone, or more than one someone – since the note said “we” it must be more than one – who are doing Mrs. Allison a good deed is human, but for some reason, they can’t show themselves.” Douglas looked earnestly at the young faces, gathered in the dim shade inside the tipi-hut, and ventured. “I wonder if they aren’t kids. Kids like us – and for some reason, they are afraid to show themselves. They’re on the road, like all those hobos, looking for work and a meal – and they don’t want anyone to see them. But they have a baby with them. And I find that real worrisome. Kids with a baby – they ought to be able to ask for help. From Chief McGill. Mr. Drury, or our father. The Reverend Rowbottom.”

“Strangers,” Retta commented softly. “If they were from anywhere around here, they’d know to be able to trust Reverend Rowbottom, or Chief McGill … certainly the mayor of Luna City.”

The mayor of Luna City was Letty and Douglas’ father, and there was no man in Karnes County who was a softer touch for the troubled, ailing or indigent, as long as they were truly in the condition and not freeloaders looking for a handout.

“We ought to do something about that,” Stephen said then – very decisively. He was the only son of the richest rancher in the county; a family well-accustomed to doing something positive regarding any matter which attracted concern.

“What ought we do?” Artie looked around the circle of faces. He was not entirely gormless, but one of those children made to be a follower, which is how he had come to latch on to the McAllister siblings and Stephen Wyler.

“I think we out to set a watch.” Douglas sounded as if he had thought a plan out very carefully. Just as Stephen loved movies and books about bold pirates and scurvy dogs on the Spanish Main, Douglas was devoted to the exploits and the logical deductions of Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective.  “Letty and Retta ought to watch Mrs. Allison’s house and see who comes there during the day while she is away in Karnesville. It’s summer; school is out until fall, so no one would think anything of kids just hanging around. Meanwhile, Stephen and Artie and I will go around every business in town and see if there are kids that we don’t know hanging around, looking to cadge work.”

“Everyone around here notes strangers,” Artie Vaughn nodded an assent to the plan. “You should make us up a list, so we can split up and save time.”

“Let’s do it,” Douglas, being an intelligent boy, did not disdain sensible suggestions from other members of the club. He nodded, in slightly surprised agreement, pleased that Artie had been absorbing Sherlock Holmes’ logical methods.  “And meet tomorrow afternoon at four, to compare notes.”

 

Letty told her mother that she was going over to spend the day at Retta’s, once she had finished her daily chores. Retta told her mother that they were going to spend the day outside, and Retta’s mother kindly supplied them with a thermos of lemonade and some sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. The mothers of members of the Club were well-accustomed to their offspring spending the summertime daylight hours on kid-business of their own.  All the various mothers asked – and not with any real conviction that such requests would be scrupulously observed – was that their various activities not be physically risky, unlawful or likely to involve blood being shed.

Retta and Letty both were working towards Scouting badges in First Aid and had – so far – been able to staunch any flows of blood resulting from various misadventures, without drawing parental attention to them. Douglas and Stephen were quite grateful for this ability.

The girls took some books with them, and a pair of bird-watching binoculars which had belonged to Letty’s grandfather; the architect who had laid out the plans for Luna City and designs for all the public buildings, back in the waning decades of the previous century. Letty had to borrow the binoculars from her father’s study – but he was not a bird-watcher, and in any case, would be in town all the day long at his office, so the binoculars would not be missed. Retta borrowed her family’s wind-up alarm clock, likewise hoping that it would not be missed during the day. Douglas had suggested that the girls keep a log, noting the times, and for that, a clock was essential.

Retta’s father had built a treehouse in the far-distant quadrant of their yard, for the benefit of Retta’s three much-older brothers. Those brothers were now all well-grown and distaining such childish amusements, so Retta had the treehouse to herself and her friends. It was a simple platform of weathered planks with a crude waist-high rail around it, nestled in the center of a many-branched oak tree – a perch which offered a good view of the back of the Allison house across a meadow of unmown grass and the long dirt driveway between it and the mailbox on the main paved road. Since it was veiled by leaves all around, the platform could not be seen by a casual viewer. Anyone coming to or from the Allison house would be seen. It was the ideal position, as Douglas had pointed out, to surveil the Allison’s place. Retta and Letty climbed up the rough ladder formed by planks nailed into the oak tree trunk, emerging through a small trapdoor in the middle of the platform.

They had also taken the precaution of bringing some books and a pair of cushions to soften what they expected to be a day-long vigil. Letty loved spending time in the treehouse, for when the wind strengthened, the platform swayed gently, like a ship in a rolling sea.

“There goes Mrs. Allison,” Retta made a tidy note. “Eight-forty. Just in time to catch the 9 o’clock bus to Karnesville. The milkman already has been – she took in the milk and let the chickens out. And so has Sgt. Drury’s car. He must be going to Karnesville, too.”

John Drury was an older man, once a Texas Ranger, who served as a detective for the Luna City Police Department, at such times as required extra-special detecting skills. Crime did not often wave, in Luna City; such offenses as occurred were most usually quite transparent.

“Eight-forty,” Letty double-checked the time. “I hope this isn’t a day when the brownies don’t show up. I want to be the ones who solve the mystery.”

“Stephen was going to go to all the shops on Town Square,” Retta ticked them off on her fingers. “All the ones who might have hired boys to run errands, or something. Artie was going to Bodie’s, and to the Cattleman Hotel.”

“Douglas was going to the Tip-Top first thing,” Letty continued, “And then to speak to the folks at Gonzalez’ garage. He thinks that because the Gonzalez place is so close to the main road – that was where someone looking for work might go, after asking at the Tip-Top. They’re going to meet up at noon and go around to everyone that they might have missed in the morning.”

“Makes sense,” Retta agreed, as she opened her book. “I think we got the easy part, though.”

“The boring part,” Letty propped the binoculars on the railing, and focused them on the Allison’s back porch. They had agreed to alternate every half an hour.

It hardly had been forty minutes before Letty looked up from her book and spotted the girl, out on the county road that ran past the Allison and Livingston home places.

“Look now – over there, just by the mailboxes,” Letty said, softly. “See that girl? She’s pulling a little wagon … an old Liberty Coaster, looks like …”

“I see her,” Retta swung the binoculars around, and trained the lenses on the girl, walking along the roadside verge, pulling the little wagon after her. She was very obviously a girl, as her light brown hair hung down in two braids, although she was wearing faded denim overalls like a boy’s and a baggy shirt several sizes too large for a skinny frame – all this plain to Letty, even without binoculars.  “There’s another in the wagon … could that be the baby they meant – that they needed milk for?”

The girl, the wagon, and the smaller child in it were lost to their sight, momentarily screened by a thicket of hackberry bushes. Retta continued, almost whispering, “She’s … yes, coming down the drive to the Allison place.”

“If they go inside, they’re for certain Mrs. Allison’s brownies,” Letty whispered in reply. The girl with the wagon and smaller sibling was so far away that they might have conversed in normal tones … but the necessity for discretion compelled whispers.

Almost holding their breaths, Retta and Letty watched the girl go to the back door of the Allison place. The strange girl moved confidently, as if she knew what she was about, and had no apprehension about being there. She bent down and picked up the smaller child. Letty thought the smaller child was another girl, for the mop of yellow ringlets, and a baby smock which once might have been pink. Then the two girls vanished into the house – casually, as if they had every right to be there, leaving the wagon by the back porch steps.

“Nine-thirty-five,” Letty looked at the alarm clock, and made a lot in their watch-log. “The brownies are in the house. I wonder how long they will stay?”

“Depends on what Mrs. Allison has asked them to do,” Retta replied. “Say – what do we do when they go?”

Letty thought it over, very carefully. “I think that we should follow them. At least a little way. That way, we can tell the boys where they are staying.”

“They must be staying somewhere,” Retta agreed.

For some time, silence fell in the tree house, broken only by the faint rustle of turning pages, the metallic ticking of the alarm clock, and the slight scuffle as Retta and Letty handed off custody of the binoculars. The girl they were watching appeared in the Allison’s yard three times – once to open the henhouse and scatter feed for them, then again an hour later to sweep the back porch with a broom, and finally at around 1:30 to chase the hens back into the henhouse. Then, she emerged one last time from the house with the smaller girl in her arms. Retta and Letty noted the time and duration, in between bites of their own sandwiches. When the older girl set the blond child in the wagon, and set off down the long drive towards the county road, Retta and Letty were ready.

They crouched behind a stand of overgrown sunflowers by the Livingston’s mailbox until the girls and their wagon had gone past. Letty wondered if they were sisters, although they did not look much alike, or as nearly as she could judge from a close inspection through the binoculars.

“Not too close,” she warned Retta in a breathless whisper. “We don’t want them to see us following them – but we ought to see where they go, from here.”

It helped that neither of the girls looked behind; the older seemed to have all her attention focused on pulling the wagon, and the blonde toddler with the curls was too little to be taking notice of much. But Letty and Retta still lingered behind cover as they found it – overgrown roadside bushes, bends in the road, as it straggled southwards from Luna City itself, in the direction of the derelict abandoned tourist cabins, the burnt-out ruins of the old Sheffield mansion, and the derelict Mills home place.

“I wonder if they’re staying on Old Man Mills’ land,” Retta whispered, “I’d be scared to death of his pet alligators!”

Letty shook her head. “I don’t think they would dare … even if Ol’ Man Mills is practically a hermit, these days. Mrs. Mills is plenty sharp, an’ I don’t see that she would abide strangers, much. Even if they are kids. Those Millses are the biggest bootleggers in Karnes County – everyone says so.”

The girl and her wagon, with the smaller child in it had drawn somewhat farther ahead, lost to the sight of Letty and Retta around a bend in the road. They were nearest to where there remained a lightly-beaten track toward where the mansion had been – now a pile of weathered stones and timbers burnt to ashes and blackened slate shingles thirty years previously. Locals insisted that the low hill above a bend in the river was haunted. When the two girls ventured stealthily around that bed, the road which stretched out before them was entirely empty.

“We’ve lost them!” Retta despaired, but Letty shook her head.

“Maybe not … they weren’t all that far ahead of us. Look, Retta – there’s gaps in the fence, and all those paths leading away from the road. I’ll bet they went through one of them. We ought to look for the tracks that wagon would make in the dust. There’s plenty of spaces between the weeds where wheels and shoes could leave marks.” Letty smiled at her friend and nudged her shoulder. “We’re Scouts! Remember – we should be able to spot tracks!”

Ah, yes – that time of year, again: time to assess what has been done, and what has been left undone, and to consider plans for the coming year.

Ah, the items left undone – wrapping up the Luna City series, with book 12. Alas, it’s about half completed, and the creative dry spell late this year appears to have lifted. It will be an e-book only, but available in print as part of Luna City Compendium #4.

I may yet continue with Luna City stories as a YA series, with the adventures of Stephen, Douglas, Letty and their friends as children in the 1920s and 1930s. I am very fond of Luna City as a setting – the most perfect small town in South Texas. I am increasingly convinced that YA  teen and tween readers need  books which are not studies in grey goo dysfunction and misery. I did manage to complete and launch the pioneer trail YA adventure, West Towards the Sunet, start to finish, including review by beta readers in slightly less than a year. I also have been struck by enough ideas about how to go about continuing it as a series, so there may be a second volume of the Kettering family saga in time for next Christmas.

As for the household – I did manage to purchase the pet door insert for the slider door into the back porch, but the two male cats are still prone to pee on stuff – so I might as well not have bothered. As for chickens again – when Wee Jamie is a little older. Maybe this spring, we’ll try again with them. The back fence has been replaced totally, so  any chickens kept there  ought to be safe enough during the day, as long as they are locked up after dark.

As of the end of April, 2025, the mortgage on my personal little patch of Paradise will be paid off, and I will have gotten through another year of paying for that replaced siding and exterior paint, new windows and the HVAC system, all installed late in 2020 or early 2021. As noted previously, the siding and the specialty hot-climate paint with which it was covered have worn beautifully well – it still looks as if it had just been done. I am bound and determined to replace the refrigerator freezer the very instant the mortgage is paid in full, though. The one we have now has been a massive disappointment to us both – all the various plastic bins and drawers have been cracking and breaking off bits, beginning when it was barely a couple of years old. It wasn’t a cheap model, but it wasn’t rock-bottom cheap, either. The ice maker and dispenser stopped working entirely and repairing it all isn’t worth the trouble and the parts.

Not having a monthly mortgage payment will free up a not inconsiderable sum of money; I plan to frivolously spend it paying down the existing accounts for siding, windows and HVAC, thereby bringing the day when I am free to begin on paying for a completely fresh round of necessary fixes for the house – like new flooring throughout and a renovated kitchen. This may be made easier when my daughter, the real estate agent still working towards a point were a couple of thousand here and a couple of thousand there is just small change rattling around in the bottom of her expensive handbag, will have her own house. I will finally have that empty nest, with all of her stuff moved out of the garage.

And that’s what I’m looking forward to in the next year! In any case, the writing and story-telling will continue.

( I wrote this memory of a barracks Christmas when I first started blogging, and expanded it for my memoir – from which this long reminiscence is pulled. I was stationed in Japan, then, a junior airman assigned to the FEN detachment.)

All during the year, Thea and I had not given up on our idea of celebrating a proper Christmas in the dorm. We needed to develop a critical mass of people who would go along with it, and something of a sense of community in the barracks. Marsh was keen as well; she reveled in holidays, any holidays, and the foundation was laid over the summer when the three of us began cooking a slightly more elaborate dinner for ourselves every Sunday afternoon, and sharing with anyone else who happened to be hanging around the day room, bored and hungry on a Sunday.
“Bring a plate and a fork, and a chair from your room! That was our cheery invitation— there was a sad shortage of chairs around the dinette table at the kitchen end of the day room. The girls from the Public Affairs office, Shell and Shirl, and any of Shirl’s constantly rotating flier boyfriends joined in, as did Tree and Gee. The resident vegetarian fixed a vat of eggplant parmigiana, another girl, newly arrived, had the touch with the most perfect fried chicken I had ever eaten. I had bought a crockpot and constructed marvelous stews and chilis. The weekly dinner was well established and well attended, even after the dorm was converted from all-female to an ordinary Air-Base group dorm…

In November, it only seemed logical to plan our own Thanksgiving dinner. We took up a fund for groceries, did a headcount of who wasn’t going to their supervisors’ houses and immediately hit a snag:

“Who’s going to do the turkey?” was the main question, followed by “Well, who helped enough at home to stuff and bake a 20lb turkey without giving anyone food poisoning?” AFRTS spots at that time of year always spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on this unpleasant possibility.
I had helped Mom and Granny Jessie with the holiday turkeys and was unwary enough to admit it. Before I could come up with a plausible way to wiggle out, I was rushing to the commissary with a pocket full of crumpled notes and change on the Wednesday afternoon, with just fifteen minutes before I had to be up the hill and on-shift at the TV station.

Turkey, 20+ pounds, frozen solid: OK, I would leave it to defrost outside in my car during the shift; Northern Japan in November was slightly chillier than the inside of most refrigerators anyway. Onionscelerysagesausage…bread. Mom always bought a loaf of bakery wheat bread, tore each slice into clunks and dried them on a sheet-cake pan in the closet where the hot water heater lived. I zigged down the bakery aisle, threw a loaf into the basket and headed for the quick-checkout register, making it to work with about a half-minute to spare.

Didn’t even notice until I got back to the barracks that night, and took out the bread so that it could dry overnight, that I had a loaf of rye. There was no way to get a loaf of wheat bread, no way at all. It was nearly midnight, and even there was such a thing at the Japanese grocery store the next morning, it would be too late. The turkey had to be in the oven first thing.

“Oh, go ahead and use it anyway,” Marsh consoled me. “Who’s going to notice a couple of caraway seeds with all the other stuff and gravy on top!”

No one did, and it made fantastic stuffing. We all lay about afterwards burping gently and nibbling on just one more bit of pumpkin or pecan pie. I can’t remember who launched the trial balloon for our Christmas— either Marsh, or Thea ventured.

“You know, we could do a really nice bash for Christmas….”

The room perked up, interest had been piqued.
“A way bigger turkey…”
“Maybe not, the oven can’t handle it.”
“Steamed pudding… a ham, too.”
“They’ve got a fake Christmas tree in storage, and a box of decorations, too…”
“Our doors…. We could decorate our doors… and… and…. Have someone in to judge a contest on Christmas Eve.”
“Santa! They have a couple of Santa Suits at MWR!”
“He could bring gifts… we can draw each others names, and get a gift… and Santa can deliver them…”
“OK, who all is going to be here… make a list.”

The room bubbled with enthusiastic plans: the dinner would be bigger, more lavish than Thanksgiving… Santa would deliver the gifts on Christmas Eve, after the judging of the doors. Thea and I exchanged slightly smug looks: yes, this would be a vast improvement on the year before. Our cunning plan came together, as those who would have been otherwise inclined to stay in their room and gloom through the holiday were seized by the spirit of competition in decorating their doors with wrapping paper, and lights, to buy small plastic fir trees downtown and put them in their rooms. I began making ball ornaments from Styrofoam, covered with velvet and laces and gold braid, and baking tray after tray of cookies, telling everyone they were for the guys at work.

The regular dinners in December became planning sessions: we drew names, arranged for renting the Santa suit, inveigled the Catholic chaplain – the most approachable of the base chaplains – into judging the door contest, set up the somewhat bedraggled fake spruce that the dorm manager pulled out of storage. Kenny, one of the five male residents, volunteered to be Santa, although he was young and skinny, and looked more like an adolescent Donald Sutherland than Santa Claus. Some of the girls put up lights in their windows, which reflected pastel colors onto the snow outside. The upstairs and downstairs corridors became a mini-Christmas Tree lane, with tinsel and paper and ribbons applied to the doors or doorframes. Thea made a small door out of cardboard covered with paper like her own room door, and attached it to the wall just above the baseboard, several feet from her room, and parked a pair of felt dolls, 28 inches tall and tricked out like Christmas caroling mice in front of it.

On Christmas Eve, I was taking one last tray of cookies out of the oven, while the Chaplain was going around, reviewing the doors.

“Come and see how Kenny looks,” Thea said, “He’s got the costume on, but we need another couple of laundry bags for the presents.”

Even a couple of pillows stuffed down the front couldn’t transform a lanky and somewhat drunken 19 year old into a convincing Santa, but this one would arrive bearing gifts. Thea and I hastily rounded up two more GI green laundry bags, and began filling them with gift-wrapped packages, making sure that no one had been left off, there was a present for everyone. Almost everyone else was already in the dayroom, listening to the Chaplain award first prize in the door-decorating contest – to Thea’s Christmas mouse door! We cheered heartily, and the Chaplain took himself off, and Kenny lurched into the dayroom, with a lumpy laundry bag over his shoulder and dragging two more.

“Merry Christmas, ho ho ho… and have you all been good little girls and boys this year?” He leered at the room, and was answered with a raucous chorus of “Yes, Santa” and “Hell no, Santa!” He reached into the first bag, and squinting blearily, read off the name. Everyone watched as the gifts were opened, slowly and individually, while Kenny kept up a stream of drunken, slightly obscene but very funny patter, and the piles of torn paper and ribbons mounded up at our feet.

Thea and I swapped a satisfied glance: the room was filled with laughter and lights and good fellowship. Tomorrow we would dish up a lavish Christmas dinner with all the trimmings. Like last year, everyone in the barracks would still be thousands of miles from family, in a foreign country, but we would not be alone, and we would have Christmas joyfully.

I had one more little thing to do. A lavishly large box of cookies had already been left in the break-room at FEN, but all the rest—brownies and sugar cookies and macaroons, and peppermint sandwiches- were divided amongst thirty little bags, tied with ribbon and a little tag “A Present from Sandy Claws”. Just before midnight, when light showed under the doors of only the night owls or insomniacs, I went around and quietly hung a bag of cookies on each door.

Everyone deserves that unexpected surprise gift at Christmas.

So – mercifully what I thought of as a sort of creative dry spell has somehow come unblocked, what with putting out West Towards the Sunset this week. I had thought a little about making that book the first in a series, following the Kettering family on the emigrant trail west to California in 1846. I thought, in a rather half-hearted fashion, about creating it as part of a multivolume family story, rather like the Little House series, but nothing much came to mind, once I gotten them into California. I had set up some future elements by briefly mentioning certain developments, but the trouble was that if I carried them out completely, and brought the overall story forward to include all kinds of adventures and characters – the main character, Sally, would age out of being a tween-teen. It would also be a stretch, historically, to involve a female character in what was almost exclusively a male domain, in Gold Rush era California. The story would transition into something more like an adult novel … and I wanted to keep the main character relatable to younger readers. The poor kidlets need a good thrilling, informative read, after all the values-free grey goo and perversity that is otherwise inflicted on them by the current established YA fare.

What to do, what to do …

What to do … would be to make subsequent volumes sequentially centering on Sally’s younger brothers and sisters. Eureka! That would let me carry on with teen-tween characters within the same established family. I could write in Jon’s adventures early in the Gold Rush, and a younger sister and even younger brother pick up later segments of the overall story arc. The potential stories and characters over two decades of this part of the wild and woolly West are practically limitless. The Gold Rush itself, then the silver rush into Nevada’s Comstock Lode, odd-ball characters, vigilantes and crime galore, stage coaches, the railway and the Pony Express. I could write the youngest brother into being an associate of Samuel Clemens, when he was roughing it on the frontier in his early days as a writer. And then it seemed like I was back in the fountain of creativity; ideas for plots, characters and twists and turns of a narrative all popped into mind.

I have all the reference books already, and there were so many elements, events and real-life characters that I couldn’t fold into my previous Gold Rush book, I can hardly wait to start on the next one. But I promise that I will wrap up the Luna City series before I even start on the next book in the Kettering family saga.