Tributes to Special People (and Wonderful Pets)

Facing Miss Blunt
© 2023 Richard Drebert

It’s been 50 years since I worked for the schoolmarm who lived up the street on Laurel Avenue. I was a skinny kid in a dirty white T-shirt, and I was afraid to stare, but more afraid not to give the 80-year-old woman my full attention. She had instructed unruly farm boys for half her life, and in her watery blue eyes I read (in perfect cursive): “I’m not too old to wield hickory, young man!”

Someone had chiseled Miss Blunt’s face from a hunk of firewood—not smooth laurel, but grainy, seasoned oak. Distracting whiskers erupted from moles in her chin, and she lisped through a single bottom-row of jutting, yellow teeth. Joints in her jaw worked like worn hinges, and perspiration glistened in two unruly hedges above her eyes.

Miss Blunt’s raspy voice piped from cords shrunken by years of lonely, internal reflection, and I froze as she stepped within inches of my nose.

Homecoming For Elle

Elda “Elle” Mae Smith, 96, went to be with Jesus on April 29, 2022, in Anchorage, Alaska, at Twin Hearts Assisted Living for the Elderly. Elle was born on January 13, 1926, in Douglas Arizona, to Clifton and Mildred Smith. She is survived by her son, Richard, two daughters, Kasandra and Janette, seven grandchildren, and 26 great grandchildren. No formal services are planned at this time.

Elle's Story

Oh, yes! I remember the Great Depression: We lived in a wall tent on the bank of a stream near Fresno, California. These were hard times and jobs were scarce. People stood in government breadlines to feed their families. My father was a machinist by trade, and he designed a sluice box for finding gold. Dad built me a little sluice box too. Dad and Mom made enough money by panning for gold to avoid the breadlines.

When Dad got a letter from my Uncle Russel about a job opening at Sulfur Bank Mine at Clear Lake, we left the streams forever. Dad went to work for a rich man named Bradley, who lived in a big manse overlooking the company houses where the mercury miners lived. Dad maintained machinery in the caverns of the quicksilver mine, where crews filled up vats with liquid mercury.

Graybeards’ Charge

Have you ever considered how blessed you are, if the graybeards in your family are/were God-fearing, gentle souls? I look at my own family and feel cheated that my grandfathers hoarded their wisdom and experience during their golden years.

I never met Grandpa Smith. He commercial fished in the Gulf of Mexico. He was a machinist by trade and maintained equipment at a California mercury mine during the Great Depression. He was a veteran of World War I who suffered from a mustard-gas attack, and he worked in the shipyards during WWII. He had one daughter (my mom), whom he never visited, but he sent crates of oranges from Arizona once a year till he died.

Smokey stood 15½ hands, but the gelding’s wide back looked as high as barn rafters to the eleven-year-old in cowboy boots. A resounding nose-snort startled the child, and he perceived the warning to mean, “Son, you’re about to bite off way more than you can chew.”

With a single kick of one shod hoof, the half-Morgan, half-Quarter horse could crush the boy’s skull. With a sudden swing of his rump he could pin the boy against the split-rail fence. The child took a deep breath and warily flopped the pungent, sweat-stained blanket onto the horse’s back. He stood on tiptoe to adjust the Indian blanket just behind the horse’s withers, as he had been taught. Today, he might graduate behind the barn, absent family spectators or tutors. He owned the day; it was his to succeed or fail.

Young Ruffy’s coat was black; not black, like semi-sweet chocolate, but deep, blue-black, like a raven’s wings. He wore a tiny patch of white upon his chest, and four, small, white boots on his paws to complete his dapper outfit. Ruffy’s mother was a Cocker Spaniel, his father a Border Collie. I never actually met them, but they must have been fine folk, for their son certainly was a credit to their family. His deep brown eyes expressed a kindness that spoke of genteel ancestry.

Ruffy came home with my mother and father when he was a two-month-old puppy, and when I was a vigorous four-year-old. He endured my years of ear-pulling, and tail yanking with grace, and he grew to be my protector and playmate.

Richard Drebert

Writing Stories "for Such a Time as This."

Is your heritage a mystery to your family and friends?

Tributes to Special People (and Wonderful Pets)

Homecoming For Elle

Graybeards’ Charge

Richard Drebert