I have spent the majority of my quarantine working.  I wish I could say that I have been able to sew and binge watch tv but that hasn’t been in the cards for me.  I work in Agriculture and we still need to get the crops in the fields for the world to be fed.  So I have kept really, really busy.  My bright spot in each day has been listening to some of my favorite music while I work and turning on some live music and listening.  A lot of entertainers have been playing daily and weekly musical shows on different apps and I have really enjoyed listening to them.  I have also been reading a lot.  It calms the mind each evening to grab a book and get lost in a story.  This is a little stack of books I have read since the quarantine started. 

 

Above are my favorite classics that I can always read over and over.  Missing is to kill a Mockingbird which is my absolute favorite story.  Persuasion runs a close second. 

I still have so many books in my to read piles.  Here are a few that are at the top of the stack.  So many books and so little time…. But the quarantine has allowed me a bit more time…I am trying to use it doing things that bring me joy. 

Winter has arrived in all it’s coldness.  I switched jobs last Fall and I now get to work from home.  I LOVE it.  I feel so blessed to be able to do what I love and do it from the comfort of my home.  I never thought I would be this blessed with my work.  It is so nice to put my sweats or leggings on each day and walk the thirteen steps to my office and not have to go out in the morning cold.  I do try to walk each day at my lunch hour just so I don’t get too fat and lazy.  If it is too cold outside, I just do my stairs over and over.  It seems to do the job. 

The new year has arrived and with it a few resolutions.  I am fifteen days in and feel they are going to be easy ones to keep.  I really want to move away from spending time on my electronic devices.  I have been able to do that so far and I have already read 2 books and I am almost finished with a third.  It is nice to be spending my time getting back to what I really enjoy.  I also want to do better in prayer.  I have done better with this also. 

This Spring I hope to meet with some of my newfound family.  I started this journey last year and have written about finding two sisters on my biological father’s side.  We are the three that want a relationship.   I am up to 8 siblings from my biological parents.  I have found that from my father I also have 2 deceased brother’s and a sister that we know is out there as he paid child support on her, but she has not been found yet.  After my oldest sister found me, I filed for my birth certificate in hopes of proving that we are sister’s.  It arrived almost 8 months after I requested it.  It did not have my father’s name on it, but it did have my mother’s name and I was shocked to find that it was a not common name but one of my school friends growing up had the same last name.  I contacted him and to make a long story short, he is my cousin.  My adoptive parents had moved from another town in our state, so it was very coincidental that they moved in the same area that my mother was from.  My newfound cousin’s family jumped in the search and within hours I found that I have three sisters from my mother.  My mother has passed from breast cancer, wow, so happy to find that out, not only for myself but for my daughter and granddaughter.  I have a sister locally that her kids and my kids (cousins) went to school together and were friends.  It is just all so unbelievable.  She does not want anything to do with me and said to consider myself lucky that I was adopted out.  I have a sister in Florida that has not reached out for contact and one that has passed away.  It has been a good journey for me.  Not a journey that I really felt I had to have, as I am so loved by my adoptive family and they are my family.  But it has been a good journey in that I now know my circumstance and I have found out medical history.  I feel I have a happy ending as I am going to have a couple of really good friends in my two half-sisters, but in the end, the family I have always known and love are still my, I am there for you every day, family.  Yes, a happy ending. 

The holiday’s put me in a melancholy mood.  When I was young Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday.  Our family would travel to my dad’s cousin’s home.  They lived about 45 minutes away from us in the country.  Back in those day’s everything closed for the day.  You would be lucky to even find a gas station open.  I can remember sitting in the backseat driving to Joy and Charlie’s house and just gazing out the window at the quiet.  The trees had all dropped their leaves by this time and even though the land was barren looking with the crops harvested and a wide window to all with the leaves off the trees, there was a magic to it all. 

Family members from all over the country would arrive to spend the day together.  As kids we would spend hours outdoors playing football, sliding down the hill on the leaves, having fun.  The home had two kitchens, one upstairs and one down so there was much activity with the meal being prepared.  After dinner if you walked into the large living room there would be men in every seat half asleep with the football game on.  I was drawn to this sense of togetherness.

It is now almost 50 years later, my grandparents are long gone, my parents have passed and I still can’t drive down the road during the holiday’s without looking out the window and thinking about each home and wondering how they are spending their day.  Are they planning on family coming for the day, are they decorating, or do they not even celebrate?  I feel that sense of quiet again.  A feeling that all is right, that the love of family can overcome all.   

It is a scary time for all.  The world has changed so much in those 50 years.  I fear for my grandbabies and the world they will live in.  I wish it could all be so simple again.  I wish we could all feel that sense of quiet - all is good, all is safe. 

Yesterday in church we sang O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.  The last verse touched me so.  I looked it up and it was written in 1861.  Could it be that the fears have always been here, the desire for so much more has always been here, that the quiet has always been here.  We just need to find it within ourselves.

[Verse 7]
O come, desire of nations, bind
In one the hearts of all mankind
Bid Thou our sad divisions cease
And be Thyself our King of peace

[Refrain]
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel

Merry Christmas to all.

Wow this Summer just flew by.  I think it was my busiest one yet.  We had four weddings this Summer. That means 4 weekends away to celebrate love.  They were all so much fun and how wonderful it is to spend time with friends and family. 

We spent some great days on the lake.  We are fortunate to have some lake property just 30 minutes away.  That makes it oh so easy to grab the grand kids and hit the water.  We are going to head that direction this weekend as we need to get things put away and boat cover on as we have already had a couple of nights with freezing temperatures here in the Midwest.

Baby Van arrived in July and he is now almost 3 months old and the sweetest baby!!  My heart melts when I am with him.

One of my BIG loves is music.  I have been a music junkie my whole life.  As this was the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, we declared this to be the summer of music.  We went to over 20 concerts and we also went to two music festivals.  I was able to cross a lot of peeps off my bucket list.  I think my favorite show this Summer was Judah and the Lion.  They put on such a high energy show and the crowd was a part of it from start to end.  I went to two concerts in Vegas one being Def Leppard and it was amazing!!  My biggest surprises for the summer were The Dead and Company and John Fogerty.  They were both great shows.  Number one off my bucket list was Guns N Roses, they were as awesome as I thought they would be.  My biggest disappointments were The Who and Hall and Oates.  Daltry and Hall’s voices were not what they used to be.  To top the Summer off our friend actually attended Woodstock in ’69 so we had a party to honor him. We all dressed in 60’s attire, played the Woodstock list from Spotify in the background and had cocktails made from the Peace Vodka we had purchased at Bethel Woods last year.  We served Guns N Rosa and Stone Temple Pinot wine.  All in all it was a great summer of music!!

I hope to get back to some sewing this fall. I have been working on hand applique projects during my lunch hours at work.  Hallmark Christmas movies start in 10 days so I will have a lot of recliner time in my future.  What better time to get back to all my unfinished projects. 

So much good has happened this summer.  My heart is full!!  My oldest son was married in June in the Teton Mountain range area.  It was such a beautiful wedding with an awesome couple.  We were able to spend almost 2 weeks out west and it was fabulous.  I had all my children and grandchildren with me and I couldn’t ask for a better couple of weeks. 

I also had the Teton Summer Wedding quilt finished in time to gift.  My friend Viki quilted the quilt and she did amazing work.  The fish became fish with scales and the trees became trees.  Viki made it come to life for sure.  I couldn’t have been happier with the final result. 

Last week I became Grandma for the third time and Van Anthony is a gorgeous little bundle of sweetness.  He is so cute and such a sweetheart.  I love having a baby in the family again.  I am sure his older sister and brother will be good helpers for mom and dad. 

Next up is another family wedding this weekend.  My sister’s oldest son is getting married in Indianapolis so we will head that direction.  I love being with family!!

I can’t believe it is June already.  We did not have a very nice spring and so far it is just been wet and rainy.  I spent many years working in agriculture.  I feel so sorry for the farmers that have not been able to get their crops in the field due to all the rain.  We have a lake place and so far we have spent very little time as the weekends have not been very nice or warm.

I have been able to do one of my favorite things quite a few times already this year.  I am a concert junkie.  I have gone to 100’s of concerts in my lifetime.  I just love music.  In May I was able to see The Who for the first time.  What fun!!  I also went to see Kool and The Gang as they opened for Foreigner.  Foreigner is one of my favorites as every song they sing was a hit.  Next up was The Zak Brown Band followed by Jon Pardi and Dierks Bentley.  All in all a good line up so far.  Next week I am going to see Dead and Company. 

I have not accomplished much in the sewing room due to having company for a week and taking a small vacation before that.  I have worked on small hand projects as I am trying to follow along with a group I am in on facebook and complete Cheri Saffiote Payne’s Sweet Land of Liberty. 

I am still finding family.  After my half-sister in Pennsylvania found me last year I received another message in December from a gal in Kentucky.  She is two years younger than me and was given up for adoption also.  We found that we share a large amount of DNA, enough so that we are half-sisters also.  We share the same father as my first sister and I share.  So with little to no work from me I have now found I have two half-sisters.  I have two sisters from my adoptive parents where I was the middle sister and once again I am the middle sister to my blood sisters.  It is all very exciting and fun as we all seem to be alike in many ways. 

 

 We loaded up the RV and headed north last weekend.  We traveled to Holland, MI to the Tulip Festival.  Tulips are my favorite flower.  Every year for my early May birthday my honey sends me tulips.  This year he said he was just going to take me to them.  They were beautiful.  A sea of tulips everywhere.  The weather was absolutely beautiful, we picked a good weekend to go.  I have always been a fan of the antique tulip applique quilts.  Someday I am going to create one.  I know I have a tulip quilt in me.  One of the fun finds of the weekend was that the local quilt show was going on.  It was fairly small but they had some lovely quilts and quilts in a wide range of techniques.  I liked that there were all kinds of quilts.  It was fun also that they allowed pictures.  I have added a few here that were my favorites.  The applique basket quilt was done by hand and just amazing.  On the way home Sunday we stopped at a couple of wineries and did the tastings.  We made it home in time on Sunday to celebrate Cinco de Mayo with friends.  It was a really nice weekend.

I started my DNA story last time.  I will follow up a bit with it.  The first contact I had was from a gal in Pennsylvania.  She claimed that we were 1st cousins or closer per the Ancestry DNA site.  After some sleuthing through our dna matches we determined that we had to be from my birth father's side of the family.  We emailed back and forth and eventually after quite a few months the amount of dna we share determined that we are 1/2 sisters.  She was not given up for adoption.  Our father left her mother when she was two.  So, she had information and pictures of my father.  My middle son is the spitting image of my dad.  We always wondered where he got his height from and it was all my dad.  I found that my dad had passed in 2012 and had not led the most perfect of life's.  My 1/2 sister is a little over 2 years older than me and after he left she did not have much contact with him.  She was not aware of any siblings.  She is a real sweetheart and I can't wait to meet her in person.   We hope to get together this summer.  Oh, so much more to come concerning my finding family story.