It's Been Almost a Year...

since my darling mother passed away. I was off for the entire week of Thanksgiving, so my family and I spent two full days working at Mother's house. We packed up a lot of boxes and sent them to our storage building. We packed up most of Mother's artwork in plastic, and sent those packages to the storage building. The storage building is climate-controlled, so the pictures will be safe until we can look through them and see what we want and what we want to share with other people. I've had several cousins tell me that if there's anything we don't want, they'd love to have samples of Mother's work to hang in their houses.

I found Daddy's stash of office supplies, and packed most of those up to bring to my house. We found file folders, file folder labels, and copy paper. We--my sister, my niece, and I--laughed as we uncovered all these treasures; we share the office supply gene, which helps to justify MY stash of pens, markers, scrapbook paper, card-making supplies, sheet protectors, stickers...you get the idea. We are all regular customers at office supply stores; Daddy's favorite Christmas gifts were gift cards from Office Max. If he'd been born sooner, he'd have mastered a computer. As it was, he just had a collection of typewriters--different sizes of type (Pica or Elite) and different sizes of carriages--both manual and electric.

I had my immediate family with me for Thanksgiving, and in spite of the losses I've had during the past year, I still have much for which to be thankful. There are so many people who are much worse off than I, and who never had the happy marriage that I had. I hope I can hold onto that thought as Christmas approaches...