Here is the latest chapter in the story of the courtship and early married life and times of my maternal grandparents, Emily Auble and Lyle Carringer, who married in June 1918. The background information and the list of chapters of their life together are listed at the end of this post. This is historical fiction with real people and real events, and is how it might have been.
And now we are up to mid-November 1918, and the world becomes a different place.
I asked my AI Assistant Anthropic Claude to tell the story of Emily and Lyle experiencing the December quarantine, and then Christmas 1918 (I offered helpful suggestions!).
(AII Google Notebook Infographic -- Mid-to Late December 1918)
Emily and Lyle’s Story -- The December Quarantine and Christmas 1918
December — The Closure
For Emily, it meant that her work simply stopped. Marston's closed its doors on the tenth, and though Mr. Peterson assured the staff the store would reopen the moment the order lifted, no one knew when that would be. Emily's paycheck stopped too, a fact the household absorbed without drama, since Lyle's pay continued and Georgia had been saving string and flour and patience for a lifetime. But it left her with long, empty days in a house that suddenly felt very quiet.
She filled them with what she could. Florence Teague, who had her own reasons for avoiding the streets, lent her a textbook on bookkeeping and a bundle of practice sets, and Emily, who had been turning the idea over for months, finally began to work through them at the kitchen table. She worked at it the way she did everything, steadily and without complaint, filling page after page with neat columns while Georgia moved in and out of the room and said nothing about the ink on the tablecloth.
"Double entry," Emily said one afternoon, looking up. "Every transaction has two sides. A debit and a credit. They have to balance."
"That sounds like a marriage," Georgia said.
"It's a good deal more reliable than a marriage," Emily said, but she smiled, and went back to her columns.
The flu came closer. Mrs. Alcott's nephew, the one for whom Georgia had sewn the mask, fell ill in the second week of December and was moved to a back bedroom, and a yellow placard appeared on the front door of the Alcott house. Georgia cooked a pot of broth and left it on the Alcotts' porch step every morning, knocking once and retreating to the gate, and the pot returned each evening washed. On the sixteenth, Mrs. Alcott leaned over the fence and told her the boy's fever had broken. Georgia received this news with a brief nod, went indoors, and was found ten minutes later sitting very still at the kitchen table with her hands folded.
Gladys wrote notes, long and funny, delivered by a boy on a bicycle who had apparently decided to make an enterprise of it. Marston's is a ghost ship, she wrote. Mr. Peterson walks the aisles with a feather duster and mutters. I have been told to count gloves. I have counted them four times. They continue to add up to the same number.
At the base, the confinement tightened again. Lyle's Monday pass vanished with the new order, and the gate was closed to everyone. He wrote every day, in Waterman ink on the Christmas paper, and Emily wrote back in a hand he could have recognized across a crowded room.
The first release of reserves began in December, Briggs told him, with the men who had enlisted earliest or who had been judged surplus. Lieutenant Goss posted the first discharge list on the fourteenth. Hennessey's name was on it, to his visible astonishment, and he left the base on the seventeenth, shaking Lyle's hand with an expression somewhere between joy and guilt.
"I'll write," he said. "I'll tell you everything. The food. The weather. The sweetheart in Coronado."
"Write about the sweetheart," Lyle said. "I've been hearing about her for a year."
Lyle's own name was not on the list. He had not expected it to be, and still, standing in front of the bulletin board, he felt the small cold disappointment of a man who has prepared himself for a thing and discovered preparation does not help. He turned and went back to the counter, and Briggs said nothing, and the shift went on.
Christmas Eve
The Board of Health lifted the order at noon on the twenty-fourth of December.
The news reached Harrison Avenue by way of a boy on the corner with an armload of the Union. Emily bought the paper, read the headline twice, and ran back into the house with her coat flying open. Georgia met her at the door.
"They've lifted it," Emily said. "Today. They've lifted the whole order."
"Then we had best get ready," Georgia said, and, wiping her hands on her apron, proceeded to do exactly that.
The base followed within hours. The gate swung open at four, and Lyle, who had been waiting with his kit bag on his shoulder since three, was through it before the sentry finished saluting. The trolley was full, but he made it to the closest trolley stop. A corner had small pine Christmas trees for sale. Lyle bought one. He walked the first block. He ran the second. By the time he reached his home on Harrison Avenue, he was out of breath, and Emily, who had been watching from the front window, was already on the porch.
"They let you out," she said.
"Until Thursday," Lyle said. "Forty-eight hours."
She put both arms around his neck, mask and all, and neither of them noticed the mask at all.
They had dinner and decorated the small Christmas tree.
Christmas Day, December 25, 1918
Christmas morning began at Harrison Avenue before the sun was fully up. Georgia was in the kitchen by six, and by seven the house smelled of cinnamon rolls and coffee. Three gray wool socks hung from the mantel, since the household owned no proper stockings and Georgia considered the objection frivolous, and each was stuffed with an orange, a handful of walnuts, a stick of peppermint, and a new pencil. The small pine they had trimmed on Christmas Eve stood in the corner, hung with paper chains Emily had cut from Marston's wrapping paper and the half-dozen glass ornaments Della had pressed on them three weeks before. The packages beneath it stayed wrapped, by Georgia's decree, until after church. Lyle sat at the kitchen table in his shirtsleeves, eating his third roll, looking like a man who intended to stay put. "Nobody has ordered me anywhere," he said, "and I'd like to keep it that way until Thursday."
Central Christian Church was full by ten.
Reverend Crabtree had not been able to preach to a congregation in two months, and he took the pulpit with the visible emotion of a man returned to his own country. He began with a list. He read the names of members of the congregation lost that autumn, one by one, without commentary, and when he had finished, the church was silent for a long minute. Then he spoke about peace, which he said was not a gift but an assignment, and about the long work of building something worth the cost. Lyle sat between Emily and Georgia and felt both women's hands find his, one on each side, and held on.
The gifts came after, at Harrison Avenue, in the front room beside the small tree they had cut and trimmed on Christmas Eve.
Georgia went first, which was her prerogative as the eldest. She gave Lyle a muffler she had knitted from the gray wool she'd hidden all December in the bottom of her workbasket, and a pair of matching gloves, and told him he was to wear them on his trolley rides to the base and not to let a Marine tell him otherwise. To Emily she gave a flat envelope containing a single card, handwritten in her upright script.
"It's the lemon cake," Emily said, reading. "The whole recipe."
"It's been in my head forty years," Georgia said. "I thought it ought to exist somewhere else."
Emily held the card in both hands for a long moment. Then she stood, crossed the room, and kissed her mother on the cheek, an act of such unusual familiarity that Georgia turned a faint pink and said "That will do" and looked out the window.
Emily's gift to Lyle was a flat brown parcel, tied with a green ribbon. He opened it carefully, and there was the leather-bound album with its black pages and the box of gummed corners, and inside the cover, in her handwriting: For the pictures you will take.
"I kept some room," Emily said. "At the front. For the ones you've already taken."
Lyle opened the album to the first page. In the first set of corners, already mounted, was the photograph of Emily and Georgia on the porch steps, the one that Georgia had not wanted taken. He looked at it for some time. "You had this printed twice."
"I wanted one for the album," Emily said. "And one for Mother."
Georgia's copy was in a small wooden frame, which they presented to her next, and which she accepted with a sniff that did not conceal her pleasure. "I do not look like that," she said.
"You look exactly like that," Emily said.
"I look like a woman who is being made to stand still."
"Yes."
"Well," Georgia said, studying the picture, "I suppose I was." And she carried it to her room, and in the evening it was found on the dresser where she could see it from her bed.
Lyle's gift to Emily was the last. It was a heavy flat parcel wrapped in blue tissue, and when she lifted the paper away, she found a cloth-bound ledger of the finest quality, with a green spine and marbled endpapers, and stamped in gold in the lower corner of the cover: Emily K. Carringer.
She read it three times. It was the first time, she realized, that she had ever seen her married name in gold.
"I know it's not much to look at," Lyle said. "But I thought you might need a place to keep your accounts. Once you've finished the textbook."
"I'm not finished the textbook."
"You will be."
Emily ran her thumb over the gold letters. When she spoke, her voice was not quite steady. "It's the nicest thing anyone has ever given me. Since the dress."
"I'm told the dress is hard to beat."
"It is." She leaned her forehead against his. "But this is a close second."
That evening, they took the trolley to 30th Street for Christmas Eve supper, the three of them in the cold clear dark, and found the Carringer house blazing with lamplight and the neighborhood full of people who had not been seen in weeks. Doors stood open. Neighbors called greetings from porches. From somewhere down the block came the sound of a piano, and then voices, thin and cheerful, working through a carol that someone had started and someone else had finished. Lyle thought, with a lightness that surprised him, that San Diego had never sounded better.
Dinner at 30th Street that night was the largest table of the year. Austin and Della, Abbie, Edgar, Davey and Amy and Maybelle, and the Harrison Avenue trio, with Georgia's lemon cake placed on the sideboard where the Christmas cake had stood the year before. Davey proposed the first toast, which was brief and surprisingly sincere. He lifted his glass to the end of the quarantine, the end of the war, and the end of what he called "the longest autumn of my life," and everyone drank to it with a heartiness that bordered on the ferocious.
Matie's Christmas card arrived at the table by hand, delivered that morning to Della's door, and Della read it aloud. It was short and cheerful: Portland was rainy, her husband was well, she thought of them all, and she had enclosed, in an envelope inside the card, a small pressed flower for Abbie. Abbie looked at it for a long time and said nothing. Then she put it in her scrapbook, which was her way.
Austin carved the roast. The family passed the plates, and the talk wandered happily across the usual territory: the war, the Marines, the house on Fern Street, the question of an automobile. At one point Maybelle, who had decided that she wanted to learn to fly, announced this to the table and was met by a combined silence from her mother and her father, followed by Austin's quiet assurance that he would see what could be done. At another, Lyle described to his father the arrangements for the discharges, and Austin, listening, nodded slowly, a man hearing something he had expected but had hoped to be wrong about.
"They'll keep you longer than most," he said.
"I think so."
"It's a compliment, you know."
"I know," Lyle said. "That's what makes it hard."
Austin put down his knife. "It will be spring," he said. "Spring is a good time to start building. The ground softens, the days get longer. I've always thought a house ought to begin in spring."
Lyle looked at his father and saw, behind the plain words, the thing Austin was not saying: that the lots on Fern Street were waiting, that the plans in Lyle's notebook were real, that no matter when the Marine Corps chose to let him go, there would be a place and a plan and two pairs of experienced hands ready. He felt it in his chest, steady and warm.
"Spring," he said. "Yes."
When the plates were cleared, Maybelle took charge of the phonograph, as she had at the November party, and wound it with the determination of a girl who had decided to be useful. The first record was a scratchy "Silent Night," the second a livelier "Joy to the World," and by the second verse the whole table was singing, Davey flat, Amy true, Abbie's contralto steady beneath them. Austin, who rarely sang, stood by the sideboard with one hand on the frame that held the November photograph and joined the last verse in a low, gruff voice. As the light began to go, Lyle took the Kodak from his pocket and gathered everyone at the front window, Della between her husband and her mother, Georgia a precise six inches to one side with her arms folded, Emily with her hand through his arm, and handed the camera to Davey. "Hold still," Davey said. "Not again," said Georgia, and held still.
By eight o'clock the lamps were lit and the dishes were washed. Lyle looked at his watch, then at Emily, and neither said what they were both thinking: that the pass ran out on Thursday, and that the Corps still had its claim on him. But that was for Thursday. That evening the three of them rode the trolley and walked the last blocks under the cold stars, past windows glowing with other people's trees, and the whole city seemed to be keeping Christmas for the first time in two years.
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Here is the Video Overview of this story by Google Gemini Notebook (also on my YouTube channel here):
This is historical fiction based on the facts that are available for the life and family of my maternal grandparents, Lyle and Emily(Auble) Carringer. It is based on my research, social history and society norms at the time and place, and it is likely realistic. It might have happened this way.
Stay tuned for the next chapters in this family story.
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- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Dance.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: A San Diego Romance In 1917.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Promise Made.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 1, May 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 2, May-June 1917.
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 3, Weeks 5 and 6, June 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Letters From Boot Camp – Part 4 (Weeks 7 and 8), Late June to July 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Coming Home -- Lyle’s Leave, July 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle Carringer Starts Work at the PX
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s First Liberty Day -- August 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 (Part 1)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Emily’s Birthday Gift, August 1917 (Part 2)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s 26th Birthday Party in 1917 (Part 1)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s 26th Birthday Party in 1917 (Part 2)
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Holiday Season, Thanksgiving to Christmas 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: New Year’s Eve, 1917
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Ordinary Days, January and February 1918
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 1 of 2)
- Emily and Lyle's Story: The Wedding Plan, March 1918 (Part 2 of 2)
- Emily and Lyle's Story: Wedding Preparations in April and May 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Wrapping Up the Remaining Tasks – Early June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Parental Counsel – Mid-June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Wedding of Emily and Lyle – June 19, 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: The Honeymoon and Back To Work, June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Georgia Moves In, Late June 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Monday People -- July and August 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: September to Early November 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: Lyle’s Party and an Armistice, Mid-November 1918
- Emily and Lyle’s Story: After the Armistice -- Mid-November to Early December, 1918
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Copyright (c) 2026, Randall J. Seaver
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