A Year In One Blog

I read Posterous updates in mail but hadn't been here in some time.  I finally get over here to notice that there is still the blog and now there are spaces?  Very confusing.  What has happened since I was here last.

My mom passed away almost a year ago and her house has been on the market since February 2011.  She was a hoarder.  Not in the typical sense but in the sense that they kept everything that came into that house since 1952.  All my relatives that passed before her left them things and they just kept a lot of memorabilia.  It took from October to February to empty the house, paint it, and get it ready for sale.  Since then it has been broken into 6 times.  This last time they took a cinder block to her back door and just smashed it in.  It was a big heavy door but the destruction is unbelieveable. 

I am still going through mom's papers and found a something I had never seen among her things. I found hundreds of old photos of relatives and their friends and even some tintype photos that belonged to my grandmother.  There are also letters from the civil war and letters from my grandmother to my grandfather before they were married.  She was on holiday with her mother and sent my grandfather a letter every day. She was 20 years younger than him and must have been very young when she wrote the letters because most of them professed her undying love and affection.

We went south to New Mexico, and north to Michigan and the UP.  I got to meet Blondii, and Laurie, and Cyn of my online friends who I had never met but been friends with for the last 7 years.   

In photos here is what I have done in the past year. Some of it anyway.  The handle instructions were ignored as my kids ripped it off trying to get the box open.  The note about parking was left on my cousin's car when she was not in a legal parking space but couldn't find anything close for my 90 year old uncle.  Someone needs to learn to spell.  Remember before you pass judgement, realize you don't know the whole story.  

We went to Laura Ingall Wilder's home, a farm that grew heritage seeds, St. Louis over the fourth, Colorado, the lakes of Oklahoma, and caves in New Mexico.