Happy Spring!

I like crocuses. They defiantly tell old man
winter “Enough already!” My kind of flower!

This is one day that I completely revel in the glory of every year. It could be ten degrees and snowing. It doesn’t matter. Today is Spring 1st, the winter is gone and there is green and warmth ahead!

Disregarding tomorrow's forecast, today was sunny and vibrant in Toledo. Our next door neighbors are lawn and garden hobbyists, so even though there was a little late winter brown, their work from last year added to the blue and yellow in the sky with some definite areas of deep green down below it!

Add to the sunshine within that it’s spring, tomorrow after David gets home, we’re leaving to travel north to Grandma’s house for Easter weekend. I talk to Grandma every week on Monday nights, but I haven’t seen her since Christmas, so I’m really looking forward to our visit! I’ll work for my room and board by resetting her computer and getting it back on board. Grandma’s been too long, in her opinion and mine, without her internet! We'll get that going and hopefully have some time to go through picture albums so I can collect photos and notes for the heritage project I’m working on.

Pop and Aunt Judy will be in Saturday and Saturday night Grandma will make her specialty for Easter dinner - reservations! Mine is a new school Grandma since back in the day when “new school” was a dream of “future school.” She continued to work as my Mom was growing up after World War 2. Papa was a veteran, having served in the Pacific with the US Navy. He was a Wonderful man and as forward thinking as they come.

Proud of his strong wife who held down the fort at home while he was serving and giving birth to their only child, a daughter, he was not one of the men who came home and pushed the women back into the shadows of society. His support for his family wasn’t just money. His was the support only a REAL MAN can provide. When the offer for management came to Grandma, Papa was the one encouraging her to take the opportunity. He and Mom engaged in intellectual debates. She didn’t have to agree with him all the time, but she’d better be ready to intelligently defend her opinions.

I want to get the stories from both sides of my family journaled, scrapbooked and ready for printing. Papa died a few months before my nieces were born. I want them to see those books, read the stories and share them with their kids or nieces and nephews some day. I want them to be able to know about their Great-Papa and their Bis-grandparents on the Italian side of our family. We come from great and resilient stock. I want to be sure that’s known, never forgotten.

Of course, there are my own personal scrapbooks documenting the life and times and people of...me! It’s my hope that if nothing else, it’s a legacy of smiles and optimism that can be preserved for me and shared with many. Of course there’s a lot to do to catch up yet! According to my scrapbooks, I’m still 39 years old!!

Catching up my scrapbooks is just part of my yearlong commitment to getting myself organized. There are some things that have to wait until after the job hunt comes to a merciful and I hope at least semi-lucrative end, like actually printing the scrapbooks, but what I can do with limited resources, I am doing to keep myself working on that goal! Besides, once I can afford the shelving units and physical organizing supplies, I’ll need to commit some time to that to!

So, there’s my mental Spring Cleaning. :)

Tomorrow is the first Friday By Request from this week. I also have some exciting scrapbooking news in my world coming very soon!!!

Happy Spring 1st!