But they did assign you as wildlife ranger. I don’t know if you were wild or the animals were. Anyway, you were the wildlife ranger for a while. You did some bird banding and kept records about some of the mammals and that sort of thing (4). You also had an assignment in photography for a while. I found that in one of the letters I was reading.
I had to get used to more intermittent shopping. Didn’t run to the store very often since one store was 57 miles away and the other was 75. We didn’t go shopping very often. It meant planning ahead a little more then I was used to doing. Cooking meant you had to plan ahead. Chop the kindling, start the fire, wait until it got hot enough. Meals were not very dependable when the ranger was out on patrol. I’d get a meal ready and it would site and wait two or three hours before you would get there. Occasionally we would entertain the summer rangers to get to know them a little better, over a meal. They mostly ate at the Mess hall. So they did not mind a home cooked meal. We lived at the Annie Spring and the Mess hall was up at the Headquarters area. I remember one Thanksgiving they invited us up to dinner at the Mess hall and I think the CC boys were they. They had sort of a southern dressing in the turkey. It was a cornbread dressing, not the kind we were used to. But it was very good. The CC camp was not very far from us but the boys worked with you (Jack) somewhat, I presume. We got acquainted with one of the boys, Jim Lockhart. He would occasionally baby site our children while we would go to town or if we went to visit somebody. I remember now, and this happened very seldom, but once in a while we would leave the boys and go over to the house next door. We leave the windows open in case one of them would yell. That was after they had gone to bed and was sound asleep. Supposedly. One night we had company and were sleeping downstairs on the hide-a-bed. I heard Charles scream upstairs. So I went up and as I went past that little window, we could see out on the field of snow, was a marten loping across the field from our window out toward the woods. When I got up to Charles room, I had a wind shield (blanket) tacked around his bed. That had been pulled down and I am sure that marten had been in the house and had pulled that down ant that is why in screamed. I didn’t find any foot prints or anything. Anyway that was scary at the time.
