Resurrection

Easter Family PhotoHi there! It’s been awhile, huh? Confession, I lost this here blog for awhile. I couldn’t figure out how to get back into it and write anymore. Lots of backend, hosting, technical issues. No time to focus on how to fix that stuff. So don’t look now but you’ll find dead links all over the place in the old posts. You’ll find duplicate comments and comments that look like me but aren’t. You’ll find missing photos and videos.

Just ignore all that stuff and I will too. I could have started all over with a new blog, new website, but there’s just too much history here to chuck it all. You can read all about when Alex was born and Rose’s adoption and our move to Texas…so much!

So now my kids are 13, 10 and 6 years old. Growing like weeds. Keeping me very busy. In this photo from Easter you see Rose has a broken arm, which she incurred falling from the monkey bars after school. A week after that cast came off, Alex the middle child crashed his bike in a horrific accident and broke his leg. Also after school but in the bayou behind our house. He just had surgery to fix that and is struggling through that recovery.

Nathan the giant is a somewhat surely teen who likes basketball, rap music, and playing Fortnite. He’s not a fan of me because I do things like ask him to clean his room and limit how much time he can play Xbox. But I’m taking him to two concerts this summer so maybe he’ll like me more after that.

In the past few years since I’ve been writing I got really into triathlon and have done lots of races including a half Ironman. But now I’m battling long term injuries including a bulging lower lumbar disc, so I haven’t even been able to run lately. Major bummer there.

So much has happened but I’m ready to pick up the pen again and restart this online platform. I hope you will join me.

Saying Goodbye to the Magical Forest

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Every summer when I was a child my family would drive from our home in Philadelphia to my Great-grandparents’ house outside Boston. We’d spend a week there, visiting historic sites, going for long drives through the country and walking along the beaches. My sister and I slept on the enclosed porch each night, listening to the sounds of the surrounding woods. The house sat on nearly three acres of land with big tall trees and thick underbrush, and when my Great-grandparents were a little younger there were veggie gardens and lots of big blueberry bushes for picking. Victoria and I loved to explore the property for hours, walking back through the woods as far as we could go, sometimes all the way to the abandoned railroad tracks that provided the back boundary. From up on the tracks you could see the water of the Back River, with its Weymouth Landing boatyard full of fishing boats ready to head out to sea.

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Eventually my great-grandparents both passed away but my grandparents kept the house, and after retirement they would spend their entire summers there, escaping the Houston heat. The gardens and berry bushes were abandoned and the train tracks were brought back to life with a regular commuter rail. College and married life kept us away most of the time.

For the past several years I have been taking care of maintaining the empty house from here in Texas. When my grandmother passed away in March, it became part of her estate and my job as executor to manage. We knew it was just impractical for us to keep the much beloved house and land, since no one in our family lives anywhere near it. My sister and I paid one last visit to the house this past May and started the process of clearing it out and selling it. It’s a beautiful house, on beautiful land. Farren-8

Our real estate broker helped us put the house up for sale in September and we immediately had multiple buyers. As of now we are under contract and working towards closing with some little complications that should be worked out soon.

Today we finally agreed on a price for the magical woods, which will undoubtedly have a couple of lovely new homes built on them. The land is the last major piece of my grandparents’ estate to say goodbye to.

Yesterday would have been my Grandmother’s 96th birthday. She is missed.