Oh, boy, oh, boy! Excitement arrived in the mailbox today. I opened a package from a distant relative and was transported back in time to the days when my Grandfather wrote letters to me from California. I was in elementary school and he was my best pen pal! He typed his letters on onionskin paper and folded them very precisely to fit just so in the red and white striped air mail envelope.
Our newsy exchanges were pretty humdrum everyday stuff, but it was exciting to me because our letters traveled by plane. GrandDaddy had moved to California when I was a young child to escape the Georgia humidity with his asthma. He did return to visit a few times, and there were occasional long distance phone calls, but our deepest conversations during my formative years were by letter.
After my most recent post including him in a photo, Ilse and I chatted and she said she had more photos of his that she could send. GrandDaddy (Homer Youngblood) had two families. My mother was born to his first wife, Cora, who died when my mother was four years old and her sister was two. Later, GrandDaddy married Miss Katherine and had two more children. Ilse married Homer, Jr. and is the keeper of many memories and stories he shared.
Today is the anniversary of my first blog post. Site stats say this is the 105th post I’ve written. I never made a formal plan to share something on a schedule, and didn’t really have a plan as to what I would include. If I had an original goal in mind, it was to continue the journaling I’ve done on paper, on cloth in 52 Tuesdays, and now on the web, to encourage others to record their stories in some way.
This blog has grown into a way to document my quilt stories, old works and new projects as well. The new projects that excite me have included many photos, sometimes family members, so the old stories behind the photos have now been written down, too. And I’ve been the joyous recipient of others’ stories (and sometimes their photos) once readers knew I was interested in such things.
This package from Ilse holds some family photos, both previously seen and new to my eyes, as well as some of unknown people GrandDaddy was hired to photograph. All are interesting, but the treasures are the ones of him that I had not seen before. Oh, my, I think Ilse in Arizona must have heard me squealing as I opened the package!
Now to scan, print, and stitch!
