Category: Extended family

June 17 visit

Here are some scenes from Spring Lake as we visited my dad to celebrate Father’s Day one day early. The strong people worked on cutting down dead trees and digging up stumps. My dad took us to lunch at a Mexican restaurant and I left him with a pan of homemade lemon bars.

Workspace

I have a temporary workspace set up in Paige’s empty bedroom where I am sorting through family history documents and photos. I have two main goals: identify individuals in the photos so we can attach them on the FamilySearch website, and assemble a family tree of Great-grandmother Cerie’s Swedish relatives.

I have found a lot of incidental treasures in the process:

  • A collection of squares of toilet paper from various countries throughout Europe from 1957. These vary in quality and composition, ranging from waxed paper to gritty and rough-ridged. Strange souvenirs.
  • A lengthy journal which described a long journey from California to Sweden, only to be almost silent about the relatives they visited there.
  • A photograph of a great-great-great grandmother that I do not recognize. She is merely labeled, “Mormor,” which means maternal grandmother.
  • Menus from the Swedish American Line from 1957 with artwork so beautiful that I framed them to display in my house.
  • Hair samples of loved ones.
  • A scrapbook of sensational stories and pictures from newspapers from 100 years ago, highlighting the cute, macabre, and cultural. I think of this book as “Cerie’s Pinterest boards.”

It is a big puzzle, and I have spent many hours studying, reading, and cataloguing these things. It is incredibly slow work. I have learned that in 100 years, when your great-grandchild is sorting through your photos, she will not know the identities of your close loved ones. Please, label your photos with care, including first and last names and locations.

A celebration for Susanna

It is my mother-in-law’s birthday today, so she gets the first photo in this post.

Susanna is getting married, and this was her bridal shower. I should have taken photos of the rest of the room, but the food was lovely, and the gifts were generous, and there were 3 more tables of guests. I was glad to be included.

There is a place for you here.

We tend to find what we seek, especially in the temple. Today, I took spiritual shelter there, and I lingered for a long time. I was seeking rest in the midst of some concerns, and I noticed there was a comfortable chair waiting for me in the celestial room.

If you need some shelter, there is a chair waiting for you at the temple, even in the waiting area or on the grounds. The Spirit feels the same, wherever you are within the gates. Perhaps you could find your own comfortable spot under the shelter of a temple spire. It’s not about the building, though. Just like a grandmother’s house, the feeling stems from the one who lives there.

For thou hast been a strength to the poor, a strength to the needy in his distress, a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, when the blast of the terrible ones is as a storm against the wall.

Isaiah 25:4, KJV

Finishing

I am having one of those weeks where almost everything I planned to do has slipped off the list. For some reason, I have been drawn to finishing things that have been on the long term list: Forgotten things, procrastinated things, things that require the kind of attention only a person trapped inside on a winter day can give. That is this week’s story.

  • I finished a book I started reading 10 years ago. It was a difficult book, despite its short length, but worth reading. It was a 17th century text of religious meditations. In case you are wondering, I don’t know why I get myself into these things.
  • I finished a huge Shutterfly photo book project that I have been working on for 15 months.
  • Today, Thursday, is my family history day, and I hope to finish transcribing dates to a spreadsheet from an old birthday book kept by my great grandmother. I have had this book for either 2 or 5 years (I forget) with the intent to do this.

I hope I am not the only one who has projects that have been put off for years. To celebrate the week, I am erasing the original to do list and giving myself a star for facing some of those monsters under the bed.

Remembering

These were my grandmother’s books. On this anniversary of her death, I have been looking at photos I took of little corners throughout her home. I can still find her wisdom and her voice folded away like a sachet that sometimes gets jostled and leaves a subtle scent. She was so good at imparting family stories, gifting us with a sense of who we came from.

In 2018, I overheard her telling my mom about her father Axel’s passing. Assigned to the shift that night was a nurse who could speak his native language, Swedish. The nurse was not just able to speak words of comfort, but do it in the language of his parents and childhood. She spoke to him, quietly and tenderly, easing his fears during his final hours.

My parents and my aunt were with my grandmother on her last night. They told me that they read to her from the book of my dad’s childhood memories. I don’t know what she heard or understood, but I am glad that there were words of comfort and memory in the room for her, too.

No lentil soup?!!

We celebrated Richard’s birthday this weekend with all the good things. He is definitely worth celebrating. We had so much fun that I *think* he will forget that I neglected to buy a key ingredient for his birthday meal so it had to be postponed. Also, I sewed him a minky winter hat which turned out to be too small for his sweet head. Really, though, in memory, the wins should outlive the fails. I hope.

A very fun dinner in an Alpenglobe in Midway
Paige attended her new ward and discovered one of her youth leaders from Arizona is a ward member there. I call that a miracle