I know you're supposed to treat every day like your last, and I didn't, and now I just want to hug my dad one more time.....and tell him how much I love him, and what I learned from him, and what I am trying to pass on to my kids....

something else of interest from the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pioneer Girl book.....emigrant trains!

Grandma Pauline Axsom had written family histories for me. My great grandparents Johnnie & Daisy Axsom had moved to South Dakota on an emigrant train.

p. 194, footnote 104.: all their worldly good[s], seed grain and provisions for a year in emigrant cars. The railroad companies offered special shipping rates to those wishing to emigrate to Dakota Territory. For example, in February 1880, the Southern Minnesota Railroad offered "a rate on a car of emigrant movables" between towns in the territory of "only $22.50". {Home and Other News BCP Feb. 26 1880)., For less than a carload, the rate was twenty-five cents per one hundred pounds. In April 1880 the editor of the Press estimated that since the middle of March "no less than 40 car loads" of"immigrant goods" had rolled into Brookings over the new rails, along with about 120 head of cattle. In De Smet emigrants camped around the town and on vacant lots.

I don't think they were in this wave of emigrants, I think they went later after they had kids and their youngest Marvin was born there. but they did travel on an emigrant train with everything they had to homestead.

found Mr. William Cullen Bryant again in the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pioneer Girl Book.....

footnote 109. p.324."The moon is at its full...asleep to-night." Wilder excerpted and slightly misquoted these lines from "The Tides" by American poet William Cullen Bryant

The moon is at her full, and, riding high,

Floods the calm fields with light.

The airs that hover in the summer sky

Are all asleep to-night. (Thirty Poems, p. 78)

Michael & Lacey Axsom have a son! facebook official!!!

We're so excited to welcome our beautiful son Davis into the world. Born 2/4 at 9:25 pm CST, weighing 8 lbs, 15 oz and 20 inches long. Thank you all for the prayers and support. —

facebook is the ultimate universal birth announcement!

a letter from Aunt Mary dated Oct. 16, 2014

{excerpts}

a good tour at the Vaile takes 45 minutes to an hour.

Last October, a friend up Mayes Rd. 9 houses told me on phone that she had a sympathy card for me when I came her way & was out walking. This irritated me that she expected me to call, so she could run out and hand it to me. Then, later, she said she also had a Christmas card for me and had laid them by her front door. The holidays came and went and the cards had "vanished" and she had no clue where they were. I had told her that she could put them in my mailbox, but she was full of excuses, (it was raining or her husband had been out running errands.). Last week, on Friday or Saturday, she called to tell me that she'd moved an end table and SURPRISE! SURPRISE! there was the lost sympathy card. (I guess miracles never cease! HA) She said, "It's bent, but I still intend to give it to you!" I responded, "I wouldn't bother!" This week (phone) told her that I'd found this offensive. It ran off like water off a duck as she didn't think so, "If I'd intended to be offensive, believe you me you'd know it!" The more I thought about it, the more insulted I felt. I wrote her a note stating that her intentions to give me the bent card 51 weeks after my brother's death are insensitive and tacky and I was dumbfounded, in dismay when she'd called me and told me this. I put the note in a bag with the newspaper and stuck in her mailbox yesterday (the door was hanging open and there was mail already delivered and her vehicle was gone.) When I told 2 other friends about her & the card, they each said, "That's ridiculous!" She's probably furious with me, but I was offended. Anybody else would've put a stamp on the card and I would have received it in a timely manner!

Three Sundays back we voted to hire an interim pastor. If I had it to do over, I would not vote for him. Last Sun., he ranted/raved about homosexuals. He said that they won't go to Hell for their sin and that it's not the unforgiveable sin. He made a judgmental remark about Mormons and condemned divorcees. He claimed re. homosexuals, "God didn't make them that way!" I don't think anyone knows that for a fact!! I wanted to get up and walk out as I was infuriated, but I stayed wondering what ridiculous thing he'd claim next. And at least I wasn't rude by sticking it out. Virginia and I and a few friends believe gays are what they are when they are born.

Freeda wrote that she wished we could walk around our old home place by Cainsville. So do I! I'd prefer to go when the snakes & chiggers wouldn't be a big problem, if we should ever do it. She mentioned a toy, iron car that dad found when plowing a garden. It probably got lost in our sand pile at Cainsville farm. It would be nice to go there with a metal detector. The toy must've belonged to dad's Uncle Alfred Boyd's kids.

Lisa's blog post. I didn't know about mom or Brenda. but Mom feeling his presence comforts me. of course she misses him the most.

I'm jealous. I know you shouldn't be jealous of people. But I am. And the people I'm jealous of are relatives.

My older sister just posted on her blog that both she and my niece have had dreams about dad lately. In addition, she has sensed his presence as she falls asleep. My other sister had at least one dream about dad right after he died. My mom said the night he died when she went to bed she felt a hand on her thigh, like dad always did when he went to bed to make sure she was ok.

I haven't dreamed about dad, except for daydreams. He hasn't visited me while I was asleep or drifting off to sleep to comfort me. And I'm a little jealous.

Of course I know if there are ghosts I won't see any. It's like my friend Sherry told me after I went on a tour of the old Missouri state penitentiary. She asked if I saw any ghosts and I told her no, as I went on a bright sunny day. She replied that you can see ghosts anytime, day or night - you just have to be open to them. And I'm not open to them.

So, I guess I'll just have to daydream about my beloved daddy. It's still hard to believe he's been gone 15 months. It gets easier every day but it's still not easy. I got to where I didn't cry at church when we sing one of the songs from his memorial service (I can't sing along but I can listen and not cry). Then, the last time we sang the song my friend Cari stood at the front of the church and signed the song ... and the tears started flowing.

I always get excited when I see a William Cullen Bryant reference in my reading......true, he is a very distant relation....but!

if memory serves, he was the great (possibly great great?) uncle of my great great grandmother Mary Alice Bryant Higdon McMican. I am reading Laura Ingalls Wilder Pioneer Girl The Annotated Biography Pamela Smith Hill, editor.

page 123 footnote 25. The New York Ledger was a popular family journal published by Robert Bonner from the early 1850s through 1887. It contained verse, moral essays, and fiction by such writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT, Alfred, Lory Tennyson, and Charles Dickens. Mott, History of American Magazines, pp. 356-63, The New York Ledger.