Exploring genealogy can lead to some real surprises. Family secrets like the baby “born” to the woman in her sixties with a 16 year old daughter. To save face, the grandparents registered the birth as their own instead of their unwed daughter, even though the daughter continued to raise that little girl plus two more. Or how about the man who stole a pig, was exonerated, then got in a fight with the sheriff over something completely different and killed him in a barroom brawl. There’s suicides, like my great great uncle who had horrible lifelong pain from arthritis or one of Mr. FixIt’s distant relatives who took arsenic. You never know what you might find when you delve into the past.

My Ancestors

I received an e-mail from my cousin’s son the other day through the ancestry.com website. He was asking for permission to look at my family tree. He’s been doing a little research to give to his niece when she’s old enough to take interest and since I have ten times the number of names in my tree over his, he wanted a peek. I said yes, of course.

Sharon and I graduated from high school together. Although we didn’t “hang out” and she may not have known me from Adam back then, everyone knew who she was. Her name put her at the end of the line in a graduating class of nearly 800 students. We knew we were about done on graduation night when they called out Sharon’s name.

I moved away two years after high school…about as far away as I could get…England. I followed Hubby #1 there when he was in the Air Force. From there I lived in Colorado for forty years. Sharon and I ran into each other at a couple of reunions, maybe. I don’t really remember. However, once I moved back to West Virginia, I longed for my local coffee group and decided to gauge the interest of my high school friends.

“The Winter Tree”

I sat in the family room yesterday, working on my laptop. As I was installing my tax software, I looked over and caught the sun gleaming through the branches of the tree that still stands in front of the picture window. Do I still call it a Christmas tree now that it’s February? I don’t know. Maybe I’ll call it a Valentine tree.

I contemplated taking it down…for about two minutes. Then I said…”Nah, we love it!” So there it stands. It serves many purposes. It brings a lovely ambient light to the room in the evenings as we sit and enjoy this comfortable space we created. The blue-grey walls take on a deeper, muted tone in the pale white light. The mechanical angel on top continues her slow dance. I have the lights set on a timer to come on at 5:30. This is where I notice another benefit to leaving the tree up. When I first decorated it and set the timer, it had already been dark outside for quite some time when the lights came on. Now it’s still daylight, giving me a visual sign that the days are indeed getting longer and spring will be here before we know it.

Something is fundamentally wrong with this world today. Ok…there are so many things, it’s hard to land on one…but today, it’s all about this guy I went to high school with. I love how the Lord gives me SO many opportunities to practice keeping my mouth shut. And I’m doing a whole lot better at it. God knows it isn’t easy for me sometimes.

So, back to this guy. We’ll call him Joe. Ok, that’s his name…Joe. It doesn’t matter if I identify him here…he’ll NEVER see this post. Because Joe is FAR too busy making snarky political comments on other people’s Facebook pages.

“Elk in Colorado” by Ginny McKinney

It’s that time of year again where Facebook is kindly sharing the memories of things that occurred in the weeks leading up to Mr. Virgo’s death. This is a wonderful feature, really. It reminds us of things that happened in the past. Birthday parties, the birth of new family members, that dinner party you had to celebrate something special. Those memories come in and give us warm fuzzies. But what about the memories leading up to a tragic loss? They can be so painful…especially early in the grief process. Even now…leading up to the fifth angelversary of my late husband’s death, these memories take me back to that innocent time before I knew what death REALLY was.

“Boundaries” by Ginny McKinney

Something I knew nothing about growing up. There were no boundaries save for one. Don’t rock the boat. Ahhh…the walking on egg shells that comes with being the child of an alcoholic. We learn at an early age to dodge bullets. But boundaries? We either didn’t have many…or I didn’t understand the concept. I didn’t know for the longest time where other people ended and I began. I lived my life in a sort of parasitic relationship with my “hosts”…much like Spanish Moss and Mistletoe. My insecurities made it difficult for me to express my own opinions. I was a chameleon…I changed with the whims of my beneficiary…whomever it should be.

Praise

Let us celebrate and be GLAD in it! It is so easy to celebrate and be glad in the day when all is right in your world, isn’t it? I mean, we want God’s blessings, right? We are happy in our blessings and we (hopefully) thank God for providing for us. It’s a different story when things aren’t going well. It is SO hard to celebrate and be glad when your world is falling apart. I don’t think God is asking you to go out in the streets and celebrate with singing and dancing if you are sincerely in the throes of pain. We can still celebrate the fact we have a loving Father who is going to use our pain for good in some way. He is working in the background, far beyond our understanding, twisting and turning events to bring you favor. We can still be glad in the day he has made, even if we can’t drag ourselves out of bed to enjoy it. I’ve been there. I know what mattress surfing is like. And I still rejoiced that I had someone who loved me more than I could ever imagine.

I have loved art since I could hold those fat crayons in my chubby toddler fingers. I loved school because, not only did I learn the secret to time travel was reading, I also learned the secret to inner peace was making art.

I was fortunate to have wonderful art teachers in school though I can’t name one. I loved working in pastels. I struggled the most with watercolor. My favorite thing is drawing. Pencils, pen and ink, charcoal, pastels, colored pencils. I love the feel of the paper and how the medium lays in the fibers.

When I first moved to West Virginia in October 2014, I was living in my camper out on the farm. Shortly after my arrival, I began to notice a low humming sound every night when I went to bed. At first, I thought perhaps something was wrong with some mechanism in the camper itself. Then I thought perhaps the furnace in the house was so loud I was hearing it. I ruled both theories out when I discovered it was continuous, not cyclical.