Born in the heart of the Great Depression, Peggy Ullman Bell grew up in books, dozens of books, as many as 12 a week the summer she was 15. Reared in historic Gettysburg and York, Pennsylvania, Ms. Bell yearned to learn what women were doing while men were fighting battles and making revolutions. The history books did not tell her, and thus her search began. Though originally from scant miles north of the Mason/Dixon Line and educated as a child in Gettysburg, Bell made her home on the Mississippi Gulf Coast for a quarter of a century. "But, I live in cyberspace," she explains in sultry southern tones. FIXIN' THINGS, is Ms. Bell's gift to her mother, Eva May Lightner, now deceased.