A Roof Against the Rain

The ninth of fourteen children, Mary Lillian Eldridge was born October 17, 1925, in Seagraves, Texas. She attended grade schools in New Mexico and Texas, and finished high school in Roswell, New Mexico. She married Joseph Ceroni in 1946. Their only child, Veto, was born in 1947, and died in a car wreck in 1968. She received a BA degree in 1961 from the University of New Mexico. She has worked as a waitress in her husband’s restaurant, taught English, and after her husband’s death in 1975, raised and sold herbs in a local grower’s market. She now lives in a retirement center in Rio Rancho, New Mexico.