My family

Me on the left in the braids. Karen is the baby on dad's lap. We had a foster baby named Holly at the time.

Well my story about my family made its way into the contest! If you haven't read it on Facebook click here.

BIG hug to my team of editors. Any errors that remain are me ignoring their advice :)

Here's the picture without the editing:

I think the guy was a pretty good photo shopper or whatever it was called in 1958. You can only really see it around his waving hand. Jesus is a bit more obvious.

The studio picture is really nice.

It must've been carefully brought home from Florida. I only learned about the cardboard barrel this week. It lived in mom's craft and sewing material cubby till they sold the house in 1990 and I never thought to wonder where it came from.

My dad was a very deep thinker but he simply couldn't take those thoughts and verbalize them. It would have been very very painful to hear him try to speak in public.

That's him standing in front of the house he built us with his own hands. I was 9 months old when we moved in. That's mom's handwriting, she needed to label everything as she lost her memory. This means that our photo albums are mostly mislabeled and we're okay with that but this one's just right.

Until I wrote this story I never gave any thought that my family must have lived in that hut for months. I knew the peanut butter and cabbage from a truck story and somehow didn't think that those two things wouldn't have sustained a family of seven for very long. Apparently there was a lady named Goldie who was particularly kind to them. She even wrote to my sister Anne and sent her a certificate of salvation so my parents must have written to her or left a relative's address. The kindness of strangers.

Someone they thought they could trust reported dad for trying to work without a green card but I think being deported ended up being a kindness too.

That baby is me.

This picture would have been taken not too long after they came home and were taken in by my mom's sister.

After we were taken in and lived in the doddy house dad worked on the farm for a while. Mom told me that on the day I was born she told dad that she needed to get to the hospital and he said ok but he needed to feed the pigs first. Having already had five children mom shook her head and said NOW!

Mom was no pushover. She quietly ruled the home. But she truly did love my dad and would have gone anywhere with him. He thanked her over and over in their last years and apologized many times for how greatly he uprooted her life. Once she settled in a church that she loved though he respected her right to stay there.

Most of my relatives are still old order or conservative. My first language was Pennsylvania Dutch and I've always been grateful that we have an easy comfortable visiting relationship with our relatives but just as grateful to go home in a car.

Today I had a really fun night out with high school buddies!

We missed Grace because she is in treatment again. She's had a setback so I'd appreciate your prayers. She's as spirited as ever and is enjoying her hair for as long as it lasts. I'm kind of glad I didn't have to wear a wig because it would have had to be specially made in size extra-huge.

My mother also told a story about how she yelled at my dad right after I was born because of how large my head was. Well, she probably spoke a bit sternly. Yelled is an overstatement. There was never any yelling at my house. One time I said to my friend, you know that was an argument that you just witnessed. She had NO idea.

I am a fortunate person.