As you sow, so shall you reap

Summer is ending and that means it's the end of my garden for the year. It is giving me cause to reflect on why I go to the trouble in this day and age, when I could easily drive to the store to get what I need.

I think gardening is something I inherited. My grandparents were farmers. When they moved from the farm into town, essentially their entire backyard was devoted to growing food. I fondly remember helping Grandma pick green beans then sit on the back porch, colander in her lap, and snap them with her to prepare them for dinner. Or being with Grandpa in the middle of the blackberry patch on a hot summer day (I swear most of the berries made it to the kitchen for the pie).


My favorite though was when we'd go visit and I'd get up really early before the rest of my family and head down to the kitchen. Grandma would already be up fixing breakfast and we'd go out and pick strawberries fresh with morning dew.

My Dad, following their example, has always had a garden. He has about 1/3 of his yard as vegetable gardens. He spends hours cultivating the soil and picking his "crops." I grew up helping dig and plant, weed and harvest. Whenever I'm there I always ask to see his garden. He takes great pride in the fruits of his labor and always sends me home with tomatoes. There's nothing like the beefsteak tomatoes he grows.


When we moved into this house I knew I wanted to have a garden and grow some vegetables. My husband built a raised bed with a trellis area for plants with climbing vines.





Each year I make my selections of what to plant. Some years are more plentiful than others (the year of the cherry tomatoes) and some choices don't work out (watermelons have been a big failure). It is such a pleasure to walk out back and pick a zucchini for dinner, grab a couple tomatoes to add to a salad, or harvest cucumbers to make a great cucumber pasta salad. My girls would help me when they were younger. This year the only help I got was in selecting what to plant (what they wanted to eat). I very well might be the end of our family vegetable gardening. But I hope that maybe one day when they have their own plot of land they'll get the urge to get dirt under their nails and continue the heritage.

A Thousand Words

I try to post with some regularity, but sometimes other projects take up most of my spare time and I don’t take the time to write a new post. Currently, I am working on a photo project.

I love photographs and especially the convenience and immediacy of digital photography. My husband’s generous cousin sent me a digital camera a couple of years ago - she was trying to inspire me to sell my handmade doll clothes on ebay (a future blogpost topic?). I keep the camera in my purse, so I have it with me most anytime a photo op presents itself. Downloading the pictures to the computer is so quick and easy with my digital memory card reader, I usually get the pics off the camera after each use. The photo editing software that is available today means every picture you take has great potential. I crop, remove red eye, adjust the contrast – whatever it takes to enhance the image to best capture that moment.

My photos are my screensavers at home and at work. They provide a slideshow every time I stop working for a moment. (Sometimes I’ll intentionally stop working just to watch a slideshow of some of my favorite people and times!)

But I was thinking about all of the pictures I have from before I went digital, sitting in albums in a trunk in our living room. There are some great pictures there, and some very important moments. I wanted to have them on my computer too. Knowing it was a huge undertaking, I started scanning photos. I started with the oldest pictures – photos of my ancestors.

Then I worked on my one album I have with pictures from my childhood. I didn’t sca n every photo, just my favorites and the ones that represent an important event or memory.

The old snapshots scan really well. Some that were too dark or fuzzy since the day they were taken on film and developed can actually be adjusted and fixed. The old prints that have faded can have the saturation adjusted and the color comes back to life. Shots that were so far away can be cropped - the subjects come to the forefront, bigger and clearer than ever. A couple have had marks and scratches and seemed worthless, but even those can be retouched and look better than ever.

Of the more "recent history" albums, I’ve only made it through from the time my husband and I met up to our wedding rehearsal. Obviously I have a long way to go – 18 years and 3 kids worth of pictures – probably about 30+ albums in all.

But when I’m through, it will all be worth it. I’ll be able to burn photo discs and make multiple copies to store in a fire safe and share them with my family. I envision the ease of creating graduation and wedding slideshows for the girls when the time comes. I’m certain I’ll be using more of them when posting to this blog – it may even provide new topics to post about.

I am really enjoying my trip down memory lane as I go through the old albums. As I add to my computerized pictures, the “old” photos start appearing in my screen saver slideshow – it really makes me happy to see them intermingled with the more recent ones.

Family Stories

When I was very young, my parents took an interest in tracing our family tree. My mother started doing historical research, interviewed family members, wrote to distant relatives and was able to come up with fairly detailed genealogies for both sides of our family. As part of the research of the paternal side we visited small cemeteries deep in the hills of Muskingum and Guernsey counties. Believe it or not, I have fond memories of running and playing tag with my sisters in the graveyards amongst the tombstones on many beautiful, quiet, hot summer days, while our parents took careful notes of dates and names, and sometimes took rubbings from the headstones of our ancestors.
An interest in genealogy is a family trait that I inherited. I enjoy research in general - with ~20 years spent at the library I’ve done more than my share of looking for answers, and have often been told I’m good at it. Even my current job requires quite a bit of research. The historical anecdotes of family trees are fascinating to me. So I took on the responsibility of maintaining and updating the family tree. Thankfully, in this computer age there are boundless resources available. My first task was to computerize the research that my parents had done into a genealogy electronic database program so I could easily identify any gaps. Then I turned to online resources. I discovered links to family lines that my parents’ research would never have uncovered. I located long-lost family members, and I met strangers who we are actually related to. Currently, our family history is rather detailed and complex. The software program I use allows you to print your family “story” which I printed out and presented to my dad a couple of years ago. To see the work that had been started years ago by my mom combined with my new exploration – well, it was a gift he still treasures.

While on vacation this summer as we walked through a wooded path to the lake, I spotted an old forgotten family cemetery through the trees. Making our way off the path through the forest, we climbed over a portion of rusted wire fencing. It was a beautiful, quiet, hot summer day. We wandered over the graves and explored the tombstones, many broken and leaning on others, some so old and worn they could not be read. We called out to one other the names and dates of soldiers, infants, families – each lost in our own thoughts. Looking back on the experience, the genealogist in me hopes that some descendent has documented their stories. But my thoughts that day were taking me back to another cemetery, another family, another story…