Another New Year

Greetings Pocock in-laws and outlaws. This is my first blog attempt so please be patient. Now, what to say…Hello way out there in space…I miss the 3 cent stamp and a letter in the post.

Speaking of letters, is anyone sorting through collected debris gathered from years past? What to keep, what to shred?

We just found four boxes of missionary letters from our four missionary children…I AM going to bundle them up and pass them on. But I have pictures, documents, certificates, etc…any easy clue as to what to do with them? I have this amazing example of my mother, Elda, who even had her garden gloves washed and folded before she passed away. I would be ashamed for anyone to see my stuff in the unorganized condition it’s now in. It seems that I have kept old dance cards from high school…oh mercy.

I’d like to pass on some thoughts that impressed me recently from Ivan Doig, one of my favorite writers. He was raised in Montana and before his writing training and career, did ranch work. He is now in Seattle as an academic professor, and…well, here is what he said: (he is commenting on not finding other people who had been raised like he was):

“Then during one of those winters of discontent in graduate school, my father and my grandmother…my mother’s mother…came to Seattle to live with my wife Carol and me for the sake of my father’s health. I had done only enough of each of those Montana ranch jobs to convince me I did not want to do it every day the rest of my life. But here was a pair of persons who had gone on doing those tasks, and many more, until they simply could not, any longer.

The sight of these two people of the past who had raised me…Bessie Ringer, ranch cook, diehard Montanan since her early twenties when she stepped off a train in Three Forks with an infant daughter and a jobless husband; and Charlie Doig, ranch hand and rancher, born on a sagebrush homestead in the Big Belt Mountains south of Helena…the daily sight of these two in our Seattle living room, with a shopping center out the window below, very much made me aware of the relic-hood of the three of us. In the strictest dictionary definition: “an object whose original cultural environment has disappeared.”

SOUND FAMILIAR? Lets blog…I need friends. Janet