A sweet gift

Me and Dad and Peggy, Salt Lake City, 1963

My parents took slides when my sister and I were little, not that many snapshots or printed photos. Once in a while we would get out the slides and look at them, but we didn’t have one of those carousel slide projectors. We used a hand-held slide viewer into which you’d pop the slides one at a time.

We were not scrapbookers or diligent family historians. I think because we were a moving-around family.

America has two kinds of families – moving-around families and staying-put families. I bet you know what I mean. Moving-around families usually come about to support one partner’s career. As a result, you don’t end up in the town or even the state where you went to high school. My parents grew up in South Dakota, but lived in Illinois and California (separately, before they married), and  Montana, Utah and Colorado as a couple before settling in Montana in the sixties.

Staying-put families have jobs or businesses and farms that stay in one place and give them roots. Thus, family members spend their lives right where they went to high school.

I think, as a moving-around family, we evolved the habit of putting lots of social effort into making and sustaining new friendships. And less effort into extended family and family traditions, including family history.

When I married into a staying-put family, I came with no scrapbook, no mementos, no traditions. I think I always missed it, maybe not always consciously. What could I do?

For Christmas this year, my parents had about 100 of those slides scanned and put on a disk. What a gift! I feel like the velveteen rabbit, after he becomes real.

Peggy and Sam in Billings, 1970

Farewell, Miss J

On Thursday morning, Juno became suddenly and seriously ill. Her cancer, diagnosed in July, caught up with her. She couldn’t walk and had trouble breathing.

We took her to the Middleton Emergency Veterinary Clinic, where the kind people there ended her suffering.

I miss her terribly. Juno and I communicated well, and she stuck pretty close to my feet for 12 years. Everything around here seems quiet.

Below are photos of Juno in 2008 and in 1996.

Between July and when she was taken ill yesterday, Juno had five months of great days. She stole steaks, rifled through many wastebaskets and chased squirrels and rabbits. I’m happy that the last months we had together were fun, and that her final illness was brief.