Puffin 
My Aunt Billie loved Puffins. I loved my Aunt Billie. Her real name was Ruth. To keep family from mixing her up with our other Aunt Ruth, she preferred to be called Billie. For the longest time, Aunt Billie wore a big bee-hive hair piece circa 1963. She had hair, she just preferred to wear this hair piece instead of dealing with styling her hair every day. I know of other women who do this and always look perfectly coiffed and after seeing some very cute hair pieces on the shopping channel, I just may do this too some day.
Aunt Billie was a volunteer fire fighter and paramedic along side Uncle Harry, her husband. They served their small town in this way as well as Uncle being the Mayor for a while. They also hunted and went camping together and loved to go to Flaming Gorge and cruise around on their house boat.
I always loved visiting them when my parents would drive us up in the summer. They live over three hours away and when I grew older and ventured out on my own, I didn’t go and visit them by myself.
My husband and I visited them when I went to Wyoming for my bridal shower, and we saw them again at Grandma’s funeral a year and a half ago. You always think you have time and that people will be there waiting, in the same old worn chair in the same corner of the living room.
Funny how we forget that time does march on and the people we love can’t wait around for us anymore than we can for them.
Be the one who reaches out. Remember to visit your family now and again lest you should receive a phone call one day with someone on the other end telling you another part of you, another connection in this world of so many nameless faces has been taken away.
My grandmother came to America when she was just a baby, held in the arms of her mother. She would have been born here, but something happened on the first trip and great-grandma was sent back and had to try again later.
When great-grandmother landed on Ellis Island, the immigration officer changed grandma’s name from Emalia to Molly. Great-grandma and great-grandpa traveled from New York, all the way to Wyoming. My family is part of the German’s from Russia. That’s not the story I’m telling right now although, it is a great story and you can even buy a VHS that tells you all about it. Not here, somewhere else. Put that credit card away.
Thankfully, there was no, No Child Left Behind, program when grandma was a child and she had to learn English and be able to communicate with the people around her before she could attend school. After all, she was in America, not Germany.
Grandma out lived two husbands. The first one was my biological grandpa and I never knew him. He was a welder and had a shop across the street from their house. One day grandma went to the shop and found him, dead of a heart attack.
My mom is the second youngest of the nine children grandma and grandpa had together. My father was in the Navy until I was ten and in the summers when Dad would be on tour, we girls; me, Mom and my sister, would get on a plane and fly out to Grandma’s house with our little Yorky and spend several weeks in Cheyenne with her/our family.
Later, when Dad retired from the Navy, I was 10 years old. We moved further east from California to about a three hour drive from Grandma’s house. Grandma eventually re-married to a nice man named Harold. She adopted his religion which required her to grow her hair long and wear dresses, hers were always calico in the summer. Harold lived on a cattle ranch in the middle of nowhere. It says so on the map, kidding.
I spent many a mind numbingly boring summers out there looking for things to do. It wasn’t all bad though. Being out there helped develop my imagination. Boy howdy did it ever! Grandma also had the complete collection of the Little House on the Prairie books which I read and loved. I also read Nicki Cruse’s; Run, Baby, Run- book about how he came to know the Lord after being in a gang. She taught my sister how to crochet. There were barn cats to play with and adopt. Hay stacks and barn lofts to explore.
Grandma died a couple of years ago. I miss her and her quirky sense of humor which runs deep in our family. I didn’t see the movie; A River Runs Through it, until after my grandmother had died. In one of the scenes the town’s people are having a picnic. There’s one scene of that picnic in particular that made me think of my grandmother and weep. Of course the picnic abounds with homemade edibles from the ladies of the community. One of the ladies hands her husband a piece of homemade bread laden with homemade butter and homemade preserves. Just like we would have at grandma’s house. Waaaaaaaaa!
Thing’s you could find at Grandma’s house: Homemade butter pressed into a plastic storage dish, fresh milk in a metal pitcher with something covering it that looked like a shower cap, beef-sometimes with the name Daisy written across the packages in her stand alone freezer we were never allowed to touch for fear we’d fall into it, (to this day I get a bad case of the sweats whenever I’m around stand alone freezers), books, hand crocheted doilies and afghans, hand embroidered pillow cases and dish towels, plants, an old coffee can full of scraps for the chickens, fresh eggs, gifts from missionaries she and Harold supported financially, framed scriptures hanging on the walls, those pictures of the old man and old woman bowing their heads in prayer over their meager meal.
Being at grandma’s was like stepping back a bit in time. Calico and aprons. Hot, freshly baked bread cooling on handmade tea towels. I miss it all, and I miss grandma the most.
My husband is a ppg-er. That means he is crazy enough to strap a ’small’ (it weighs 75 pounds) engine to his back with a wing over his head that looks like a parachute, the wing, not his head and go fly around.
Every summer, God willing, and last year it had to be unavoidably canceled, we drive over to Bubba’s place in another part of Colorado. A part that is beautiful in it’s own way which is more appealing to me than our mountains here. Our mountains are the kind that jut straight up like the walls of a fortress. The mountains around Bubba’s place are still at a high altitude and some are steep, but most are rolling hills full of grass and wild flowers. 
Ours are full of yucca and cactus.
On our way to Bubba’s and the field where the guys fly, we drive past cows, horses and burros (so cute! I love burros). There was one particular herd that was really enjoying their pond and this one kept standing in the road whenever we passed by. I’m not sure if it was curious or showing off how she managed to make her feet look like they were wearing shoes by getting them muddy. What do you think?
I think this is a her it’s him. I can’t tell if that’s a belly button or something else-it is an altered something else as this is a steer. Didn’t get a good rear view. Cow experts can let me know.
We weren’t able to spend the weekend as we normally do. Next year though we’re going up for the full three days and nothing is getting in our way of a weekend of flying, eating four wheeling, eating, catching up with friends, did I mention the eating?
Thank you Jeannie and Bubba for always being such good hosts.
We love you!
p.s. According to my mom (an original pioneer woman, that is indeed a male cow (STEER).
(all photographs are the copyrighted property of Melissa Bishop)