THANKSGIVING 2012

Evalyn Mary (Fink) Linaweaver was my mother and the second in the five generations of first born daughters.  She was born on March 28, 1927 to Leo Lewis Fink and Edna Louise (Tarry) Fink.

How do you describe a person like her.  There was nothing that she couldn't do rather it was milk a cow, build a corner shelf in her kitchen, lay a tile floor, or take care of her husband, children, parents and an entire parade of friends and family.

There were endless days and nights of sewing, nursing, cleaning and doing whatever else needed to be done.  The woman was unstoppable until November 10, 2012 when she went home to be with my Dad and the rest of her family.

This was the first Thanksgiving that we had without her. So who wanted to have Thanksgiving?  Probably none of us, but then Mom wouldn't have wanted that.  Nope, we all got together and laughed, talked and maybe even cried at the fact that she wasn't there.  She wouldn't have wanted us to sit around and lose that family gathering, that closeness that we always had.  I guess if you asked any of us how we were doing right now we would have to say her most famous words these past three years,"So Far So Good". 

She grew up in the depression, the oldest daughter of seven living children.  How hard of a life did she have?  I really can't tell you.  When she was together with her brothers and sisters they would always laugh about having to walk to school bare footed only to put the shoes on at the school.  They talked about not having pretty things and toys like our kids have now, but they always talked about the love they had for their parents and each other and the fact that they always had plenty to eat.

She left school after the eighth grade and went to work in the nearby town to help send money home.  She bought her baby sister her very first doll.  She always thought about other people before herself.

She married, had four children, worked a full time job and always seem to find time to do what she had to with us kids whether she was sewing costumes for school and church programs, keeping the house up, cooking wonderful meals and even managed to somehow keep Daddy very happy.

I sometimes think that her religion helped to keep her going no matter how tired she got.  Church was a major part of her life.  How many kids these days would think about walking five miles to church for summer school? She did.  Her work schedule always allowed for church and God. She seemed to depend on Him for every problem and at the end He was there with her to peacefully take her home to Him.

My mother was an amazing woman.  We should all have her faith and determination.  Her love for life and family.  Her confidence to do what someone said she couldn't and her compassion to help those who felt they couldn't do it on their own.

Thanksgivings will never be the same for our family but we will continue on the tradition and faith that she installed in each and everyone of us and all of those who she ever met.

We love you Mom.

SUMMER STORMS

Have you ever driven down a road and thought, gosh this looks familiar and when you can't remember where or why, you just kind of brush it off?  I am a guardian for a young lady that lives in Leavenworth.  She has been recuperating from an injury in a nursing home in Leavenworth.  On my way to one of the several meetings that I had to go to I drove down this road and just couldn't figure out why it looked so familiar.  Every time I went I took the same route trying to figure out what it was about that road.  I even had my husband drive down it with me to see if maybe it was some road that we drove on when he was in the band but it wasn't familiar to him at all.  I finally gave it up as just another one of the running roads from my teenage days growing up in Leavenworth.

Tonight as I laid in bed with the TV off and the room dark it started to lightening and thunder. The wind picked up and the rain came and the next thing I knew I was thinking about all of the tornado's that had been happening in the Midwest these past couple of weeks so I decided to get up and check out the Weather-bug for more information.

As I sat down in front of my computer with the lights still off a big bash of thunder hit and I started thinking about the storms we use to have out at Grandma Edna's.  How scary it was when I was little to be way out in the middle of no where with no TV or radio and the only sounds you heard was the wind beating the rain against the house and that was really pretty creepy.  They didn't have a yard light so believe me it was dark. When I got really scared my Grandpa use to rock me in the old chair in the kitchen by the wood stove.  He wasn't afraid of anything but I sure was.

I'll never forget the summer of 1966 when our area had more tornado's than you could count. Check this out by clicking 1966 Tornado's and you will know what I'm talking about.

One Sunday in June that year the whole family was out at Grandma's.  Since it was raining we had to play inside so we spent our time telling spooky stories to the little ones  but before the afternoon was over we were the ones that were scared.

In the middle of our stories a storm came up and it came fast.  My Uncle Gerald had just made it to the farm after fighting 3 or 4 tornado's on the road out from Leavenworth.  It was raining, the wind was blowing, it was dark and then someone decided that we all had better head for the cave.  Talk about panic.  Wow what a mess.  The only way my uncles and Dad could get all of the little ones to the cave safely was by handing them from one man to the other and the wind was blowing so hard that the child looked like a piece of clothing on a cloth line just blowing in the wind. It also didn't  help that the cave was dark and as we packed in there it got even darker.  By the time the men had all of the children and most of my aunts safely in the cave, it quit.  Just like that. No more storm!  It quit raining, the wind quit blowing and the sun even came out.  But what a mess we had when we came out into the daylight.  Trees were down and limbs were everywhere.

Since we were two miles from the main highway and you had to drive one mile through the timber just to get there we didn't know if any of us could even leave. The men checked the road and made any repairs to get across the two creeks you had to travel over and after we ate it was like a caravan leaving on a trip.  We all left together and once we made it to the highway the next trick was to find a safe route home.  The storms had really did a lot of damage up and down the highway going into Leavenworth so Daddy had to take a couple of different routes.  It was on one of those routes that we went down the road that was so familiar to me.

It was a sad day, trees were everywhere, roofs off of houses, cars turned over and people crying.  After driving through all of that we began to worry about what we would find at our house.  We were lucky and only had some limbs down.

It seems funny that some of that road still looks the same as that terrible day.  Like they never took the time to clean up all of the tornado's mess.  That storm was in 1966 almost 46 years ago and it never fails to amaze me on how your memory works at really weird times. Maybe I remember it because it was a very traumatic time in my life but I doubt it. I was young and it was just another day at the farm with Grandma and Grandpa. You never new what new adventure would happen.

There is a funny side to this story.  During all of the storm, the passing kids in the rain and wind, children crying because they were scared or wet, the aunts trying to calm everyone down and the men working hard to protect all of us.  My grandparents never left the house.  Nope, Grandpa sat in his rocker and thought that we were all acting pretty stupid and Grandma and my Mom worked on getting supper ready for  us to eat when the storm blew over. To them it was just another day. Now how cool is that.

Thanks for stopping by.

HOW DID THEY DO IT?

As I sat here tonight working on the computer I pulled up a game that I wanted to play, you know just to kind of break up the evening and take my mind off of work.  As I sat there waiting for the game to load I decided to make a cup of coffee, then I did my nightly breathing treatment, read for a while and finally got frustrated enough waiting for the game to open up that I turned it off.

Then out of the blue, something jogged my brain and I started thinking how stupid it was to get so upset over this and what would I be doing if I didn't have the computer to get mad at. Well one thing lead to another and I thought, I have spent most of the last 45 years running.  I don't mean jogging running, I mean running though life.

I have almost always and still do have two jobs.  Raised two wonderful daughters, helped with the grand kids, been a volunteer in numerous places, helped a few people here and there and worked on several fund raisers.  If someone needed help I was their girl.  But could I have done all of this without a cell phone, computer, cars, jobs and friends?  I doubt it.  My Grandma Edna raised seven children, canned her own food, made clothes, baked, cooked, cleaned went to social's and was active in the church and their fund raisers and she did all of this with very little money, no car, no phone, no television and during a very bad depression.

Since I didn't know her during that time, I'm not sure if she did all of this happily, but from what I have heard from my mom, aunts and uncles they may not of had a lot things and times were pretty tough but they always had something to eat and laughed a lot. The word "laughed" makes me think that it couldn't have all been bad.  What happened?  Why are so many people unhappy now? There doesn't seem to be very much happiness anymore.  How many of you really know your neighbors or the people you work with?  Do they just sit in the same room or area with you?  It's sad.  People use to know their neighbors and were friends with fellow co-workers. It doesn't seem to happen anymore.

I know that since I have taken the time to think more, relax more and do some of the things that I have always wanted to do I'm happier.  Oh, I'm probably still too busy, but then that could just be my nature.  I hardly ever watch television anymore and when I do, it is with my husband and brother in law or my little grandchildren. Power Rangers can really get to you.

I try to think how hard it would have been to do just some of my daily tasks without all of the items that I listed above.  Cooking alone would kill you.  Grandma cooked everything on a big wood stove, summer and winter.  She had it down to a science.  She made the best bread, the best noodles and no one could poach an egg like she could.  Since I enjoy canning my own vegetables, I have a hard time thinking about doing all that we have to do with no running water and no gas stove. It's just beyond my thinking.  But I know that she did it because I use to help her some and it didn't seem that hard when I was 5 or 6 years old either.  I think that is why I wanted to do it when I got older. I wanted to be like Grandma. Boy was I in for a rude awaking even with all of my conveniences.

In a way I feel sorry for my grandchildren, they have missed out on so much. Being with Grandma and Grandpa was like camping out inside.  I don't think we knew back then what we were missing out on.  But then who cares, we had a ball playing on the farm and both Grandpa and Grandma was always willing to let us help them with what ever they were doing when we could. 

Thanks for stopping by.

GRANDMA EDNA  (First Born Daughter)

When you start talking about family, where do you begin.  I have studied and searched for family information almost all of my life and I hope that you enjoy reading about our family both good times and bad.

We have kind of a unique lineage.  First born daughters.  Starting with Grandma Edna, my mom Evalyn, myself, Sandy, my oldest daughter Marie, her oldest daughter Ashley and Ashley's daughter Maycee.

Both of my grandmothers would sit with me for hours and talk about our family.  As a small child I use to take notes and when I was a teenager my Grandma Edna and I would visit my great uncles and ask all kinds of questions.  She was my foot in the door type of person.

I don't think that my Grandma Edna had a very easy childhood.  I feel that she was always striving for her mothers love and attention. Times were hard back then and do to difficult situations she was raised by her grandparents. Even though she was happy there and had a fairly good home, I always had this feeling that she felt something was missing.

She was a real trouper though or maybe because I was little and she was my grandma I felt that she was just so special.  She had eight children, raising seven and giving the youngest son up to the angels.

I know that life was hard during the 20's and 30's and it really didn't seem that easy for her during the 50's when I was growing up, but she had a way about her that always included me in her daily tasks.  She taught me how to make bread, roll out a noodle, soft bowl an egg, make jelly and those darn oatmeal cookies with pounds and pounds of raisens in them. As children we loved those cookies but my cousin Butch and I would sit on the porch and sometimes pick out the raisin's and feed them to the chickens. Then we would laugh and laugh at how little cookie we had left.  How simple things were back then. Grandma made things fun.

I could go on and on about my visits to the farm during the summers and how I was normally packed long before the last day of school and I'm sure as my memory hits me I will write about my adventures with my Grandma Edna.

I sometime wonder how my children and grandchildren would make do with the little we had at a visit to Grandma's.  Heaven forbid, no cell phones, she had a 16 family party line telephone which was separated into 4 different sections so that the telephone would ring 1-4 times in each home, but if you wanted to call out you had to make sure that one of the other 15 users wasn't on the line. Then it was nothing to have someone interrupt your conversation to ask a question on some particular item that you were talking about.  Everyone did it, and no one seemed to care about the meaning of a private conversation.

There were no DVD's, internet, computers, X-boxes or big screen TV's.  She had a little black and white television with a 12 inch screen that had an antenna mounted to the house that if you were lucky would bring in two or three stations. We only watched it on Sunday afternoons if it was raining and we couldn't go outside and for some reason a lot of my cousins would show up on that Sunday evening every year that The Wizard of Oz was playing and we would shut ourselves up in the living room, turn out the lights and watch the movie.  It was wonderful!

Those were simple days and I only hope that my grandchildren have as fond of memories of me as I have of her.

Thanks for stopping by.