The ash were the first to flush their chlorophyll in their annual winterizing, and I noticed the chlorophyll greens of the weeds and grasses along the trail are already sinking into the earth.
I've fallen behind, going through a bad patch, but wanted to say I remembered my little tin submarine from World War II days too, besides my robin-egg-blue aircraft carrier and P-38, and also a peculiar comic strip fascinating me in one of the Chicago Sunday papers called "Gremlins," apparently begun in January, 1943, named for ornery little creatures bedeviling the military, especially aircraft, causing all sorts of glitches and wrecks, odd for a comic strip. The males were gremlins, the females fifinellas, the children widgets. Though I had to look them up for the date and names, I do remember fifinellas now and finally have a source for my calling children widgets. A bit over 40 years later gremlins became larger, uglier, movie monsters, but the wartime ones were tiny, like imps and fairies, thus hard to detect, and blamed by pilots for all kinds of mischief.
I also remember V-E Day, 8 May 1945, and V-J Day, 15 August 1945. Immediately upon the radio announcements, adults rushed to ring the bells, the school and church bells and one on a short wooden tower, five or six feet high, by Charlie Ellingson's tavern, ringing them long and hard. That third one--I wonder when it disappeared--was apparently for emergencies like fires, though we had a siren that also regularly sounded the noon whistle. That third bell's short wooden stand, like a windmill, was so low that for V-J Day we kids tried to beat the adults to it. A long cafe dining room sits in the area now.
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