It all started with the anticipated at some point in the future but unexpected at the moment death of my wonderful Father-in-Law. Amidst the confusion of the moment and the attempt to juggle propriety with the schedules of children and grand-children, we managed to book, cancel and rebook flights, re-arrange a previously scheduled vacation that couldn't be totally postponed due to meeting relatives who were coming from overseas (more later), get through a very tough week burying my Father-in-Law, missing a plane flight and losing half a day with above mentioned relatives, meeting relatives, more plane flights, lots of driving, discovering the mountains of North Carolina and Great Smokey Mountain National Park, and finding the best goat cheese ever along with the BBQ at the Farmer's Market in Cashiers, NC which you knew had to be great when you saw all the bikers had stopped there for lunch. After a quiet week home peeling Georgia peaches, baking pies and trying to get life back on track, I was asked to host visiting clergy whom I had never met for five nights.....which has actually turned out to be a lot of fun.
Not a whole lot of time for knitting, even though I took a lot with me on both the flight and the car trip. I made the mistake of also taking along several books and fell blissfully into my occasional pattern of finishing books so quickly that I had to buy more. I think I just was at a place where I needed to escape into the lives of some fictional characters who seemed to be having a less stressful time than I was at the moment. Interestingly, they all revolved around knitting or knit shops, so although I wasn't physically knitting much, I was still thinking about knitting and yarn. Oh! the one thing that I did do was begin to teach my niece to knit - and she is a whiz!
Back to the relative I mentioned, she is my second cousin, which means that her father and my mother were cousins. This was almost a bolt from the blue. About six months ago I decided to try, one more time, to find some information about my Mother's family. While genealogy is slow and sometimes difficult in itself, it can be much more challenging when most of the information you have contains names that are not accurate because someone decided that the anglicized version was more palatable in the US in 1900s than the actual names that your relatives are still using. Having discovered at age 23 that my mother's maiden name was the name she had legally changed it to, and not the name she was born with was interesting to say the least. Anyway...about 40 years ago I had an opportunity to meet several relatives in London. If I knew then what I know now, it would have been a whole lot more interesting and I would have asked a lot more questions and made sure to have seen them again before they passed on. However, I did have a few names to hang on to. So...when I went searching on a genealogy website and saw that there was someone looking for someone who I was pretty sure I had met and was related to, I sent off an email through this website to the poster. After a few exchanges, it turned out that some of the relatives I remembered meeting were her parents! She was coming to the US to see her son and her sister and so we decided we would try to meet. In the meantime, she sent me all the names of all the relatives beginning with my great grandparents. I went from almost no information to information overload in a very short period of time. Now I have much more information about my Mom's side of the family, factual information, anecdotal information, stories etc. and it makes me feel more connected which is nice. Now my sister and I are trying to get the same level of detail on Dad's side of the family which heretofore had seemed to be more complete! Here is a photo of my second cousins (yup, a story in and of itself - married first cousins)
So it has been an eventful month, very focused on family in several different ways, and we are all slowly settling back into a routine where I know the day and the date, have appointments and make plans. I'm starting to find time for knitting again. On the needles at the moment are my beaded lace scarf, my son's afghan which I'm tempted to confess to hating and am almost ready to just pay someone to make, my husband's socks (and I have to replace one needle in order to make the mate since I stepped on it and broke it = stupid move), and a surprise for my sister in law. Photos later!
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