Turning back the years........

One of my relatives recently joked that I'm ALWAYS on Facebook.  They're right, in a way, as I look at Facebook as my daily contact with people who I wouldn't get to see otherwise - whether they be friends from former workplaces, past neighbors, relatives (which over half of my "friends list" actually are).

On Facebook, the newest trend is to post old photographs for "Turn Back Thursday" (abbreviated as TBT by  most who participate).

Man, do I ever have a LOT of old photographs!  I have things from the 1800's right up to last week.  It's always an interesting task to make that decision on what photo to post for the week.

Not so with this post in this blog, as three are more photos than I'm going to have room for in the memorial post I wanted to do in a couple of weeks.  What better way to do the "Turn Back" than to simply post the link to this post where I can have a little bit more of a permanent link for the person who was my very bestest best friend growing up, my partner in crime, the other side of the coin that was me, than to post the photos I've been coming across and tell about the part of my heart that was taken from me when I was 20?

June 14, 1961 was the birth date for this person, just three weeks after my own birth.  His name was Timothy James Bartlett, and he was my cousin.

This first photo is from our first Christmas together.  My walker was made of wood and I had become very used to the way it handled.  Tim's was made of metal and he was also very used to the way it handled.  Even though we hadn't started talking yet, we already shared an almost psychic bond, looking at each other before making a beeline for the Christmas tree, making our parents work very hard to try to keep us from tearing down the tree.

Then someone had the brilliant idea of switching walkers.

We got very distracted by the walkers that didn't behave like the ones we were used to, and Timmy seemed very determined to get his back, even though he couldn't figure out the mechanics of how to do so.  It made for a couple of very cute photos and also saved Memere's Christmas tree.

Tim's dad was in the Navy, so we didn't see each other again for a while, when the family returned from being stationed in Hawaii when we were in first grade.  When Disney released "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day" that winter, 1968, we were all gathered again at Memere's house to watch "The Wonderful World of Disney".  Unaware that no one else could do such a thing, I sang "The Tigger Song" after the show was over, having memorized it on that first hearing.  Timmy decided that, since I already knew the song, I HAD to be Tigger.  Some of my relatives STILL call me "Tigger", because "They're bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun!
But the most wonderful thing about Tiggers is I'm the only one".  Um, yeah.  I can be a little "over the top happy" at a lot of these gatherings......

At the end of that school year, the Bartletts were reassigned, eventually returning to Maine permanently when Tim and I were in sixth grade.  While his parents chose a place to buy a house, we were once again classmates, and then Tim was just a few towns over, so we became even closer friends.  At the family gatherings, we tended to hang out together, and the year we turned 14, we got into trouble by sharing one of Aunt Dot's chairs and discussing Tolkien.  Seems we had our heads too close together, and one of my sisters went out to the parents insisting that Tim and I were kissing.

Yeah.  Ok.  From this photo that Pepere put into a collage that I eventually ended up with, I guess you could say he was a good looking young man.  But seriously?  We were practically forehead to forehead, discussing favorite characters and favorite scenes.  He had started using the nickname "Gandalf" and walking around saying "Gandalf the Grey was sorta gay, but Gandalf the White is outta sight!"  We discussed which character would most represent me, but Tim teasingly told me that, no matter which Tolkien nickname I chose for myself, I would ALWAYS be Tigger.....

Where did anyone get the idea I would be necking with my cousin?

We tried to be a little more careful about where we had our "tete-a-tete" chats, but they still happened - regularly.  When my parents weren't able to go to his graduation from high school, my sis and I got dressed up and went to represent.  These are the last photos I have of my beloved cousin:

I had just moved in with my college boyfriend at the beginning of my final semester at BCC/UMO and I was trying to decide what I was going to chose as my major for the next semester.  I had already lost my "rudder", as my dad, who had always helped me to steer my life, had passed away from cancer in July 1980.  Tim was planning on going into the service himself even while acting as the wind in my sails, encouraging me to continue with my education and make something of myself.

Then the phone call came through from my mom.  Tim had been at a send off party with a bunch of his friends.  His brothers had all climbed into one car to go straight home, but Tim had called "shot gun" for a friend's vehicle, taking another friend home on the way.  According to the driver, they hit a small patch of black ice, and he wasn't real familiar with what to do when put into a spin.  Timmy was laughing, then there was the thud and all got really quiet.  They had hit a tree on the side of the road, breaking the leg of the kid in the back seat and snapping Tim's neck instantly.  The wind in my sail was gone at the tender age of 20.  For me, still struggling with the grief of watching my father die a slow, painful death, it was the death knell for my college career.  Not only could I NOT chose between the acting career I had entered college to pursue and the writing career that I was being encouraged to go for, but NOTHING made sense any more.  The two men who had been my entire world, the two male voices who had always listened to my concerns and helped me with their opinions about which direction I should chose were gone....

I still have days, even almost 33 years after I lost him, that I find myself wanting to pick up the phone and call Tim to run some annoying thing past him and get his view on it.  I need his silly commentary, his "old soul in a young body" wisdom, and to share a laugh as I get encouraged, once again, to keep going and to keep being that unique person that Tim knew I always was.

Some days, I need to have someone tell me again that, no matter what other name I might chose to go by, I'm still, and always will be, Tigger in Timmy's eyes.

June 14, 2014.
He would have been 53, just like me.
He probably would have HATED "Turn Back Thursday" and this "weepy memorial" to him.

But I DO believe he would have LOVED what Peter Jackson has done with "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings".  I think of him whenever I hear this tune:

The Song of the Lonely Mountain

So, Tim, there you have it:  I still miss you and wish I could spend just one more birthday with you.

With much love,
"Tigger" 

 

What happens when "Do It Yourself" types shouldn't have done it themselves

This year, as I'm trying to get outside to tend to my flower gardens and do the spring cleaning, my husband is trying to get a few projects done that should result in a lower cost for heating the house when he's finished.

You see, when we bought our house in 1998, we were madly in love with it, because it was unique and showed major potential for being a magnificent home when we did some remodeling to remove some of the "kinks" that the previous homeowner had caused to occur.  Then life happened.

Instead of spending the yearly income tax refund on remodeling, as we planned to do when pushing through the paperwork for the mortgage, we've had little "hiccups".  Here are just a few of those:

A beam that held up the front porch was rotting when the inspector did the walk through and gave us a list of things that had to be fixed before we could get financing.  He mentioned replacing the porch rail, but missed the beam.  To avoid a ton of paperwork, we propped up the roof and put a new deck under it in 2000.  The roof still needs to be replaced and is on the docket for next year's repairs.  

The former owner KNEW her septic system was on the way out and needed to be replaced.  She'd had various companies bid for the work, one of whom had even marked out where the new septic tank and leach field area would go with sticks that had been pounded into the ground.  (We learned about this when the neighbor across the street, who was friends with my husband's grandparents, came over and asked why we'd removed the sticks.)  We got the new septic put in during the summer of 2002.

My husband has had a broken wrist at work and a broken foot while riding a friend's jet ski.  He was able to go to work, but got no overtime while those injuries healed - and, in the case of the wrist, while he healed twice, as the screws and plate they used to put him back together caused problems and had to be removed again after a year.  Between him not being healthy enough to tackle the work and using the income tax to cover the bills that would have been taken care of by the overtime, those years were a wash when it came time to do remodeling.

In addition to taking out walls to give the whole first floor a very "open" feel, the former owners had added a "sun room/greenhouse" onto the back of the house.  According to the specs on the permit they got through the town, this was to be glass walled and put onto sonar tubes.  That isn't what they did.  The addition was solid sided with big plexiglass windows and a large sliding door leading to the back yard, but obviously no one ever explained "support beams" to these do it yourselfers.  The roof above the glass doors started to collapse, so one whole summer was dedicated to removing the glass door, properly supporting the back wall, and putting in smaller door.  It turned into a much larger project than expected because nothing was properly weatherproofed as they built, so instead of just taking apart and rebuilding one small section of the wall, the entire length had to be re-done.  Instead of having the money to fix up the part under the plexiglass windows where they put wood right onto the dirt with no cement footer to prevent rot and no protection against the insects and critters that come up from the dirt to eat the wood, the cash we had was all eaten up in the materials to fix their mess.  The "greenhouse" portion is one of the sections of the house that will just be getting taken off and not rebuilt, but the wall between the "greenhouse" and the main house has to be rebuilt first.

And of course, we have two children whom we've bailed out for a couple of years when they needed financial help, but couldn't get the loans they needed.

In short, the work we foresaw having to do when we first bought the house is finally getting started this year.  A couple of the walls that have been slowly starting to bow a little from having support beams removed are being opened up so that we can assess any extra work that we'll need to do, as the first "rewall" project showed that, when they took the walls out, they put good wood under rotting timbers, meaning that the support structure is in even worse condition than we thought, so we need to do more work than we thought was going to be needed.  (The photo below shows one of these rotted timbers, for those who want to see what I'm talking about.  The large beam that takes up most of this shot was put in under a water damaged beam, so the top of the larger beam was starting to rot as well.)

I've been doing something of a photo diary of the progress on this current project on Facebook, so suffice to say that the rotting stuff has been removed, new wood has been installed, and the wall closed up to make a desperately needed set of kitchen shelves.  The finished shelving unit is about 8 feet by 8 feet (a little over 2 meters square for my readers who use the metric system), and I'm looking forward to some of the rotted bits coming off in the next project.  At the time of this post, this is what I currently have where this big hole in the wall existed:

(Within the coming week, there will be framework added to the front and it will have doors added, but it's much more impressive than the hole....)

Now if I can just get enough of the books to sell to cover some of the materials needed that are going to go above and beyond the current money we have available.......

*smile*

\UPDATE 5/16:  The shelves are nearing completion, they have two layers of polyurethane painted on, and this morning, I stenciled on ivy leaves before doing two more layers of polyurethane.  My hubby still needs to add on three more boards, then the doors, but this is how this little project looks as of the moment:

(One of my mother-in-law's neighbors stenciled every room of her house, which I found tremendously beautiful, so I vowed to do the same one day.  Guess it's the day....)  Soon, we're on to project number 2, which will culminate with the removal of a room that, according to the town office, wasn't built to specs anyway, and therefore doesn't exist.......

When history comes alive......

As I've spoken of in other posts, I've been researching my family tree for years now, and am working on getting an interactive web site going that will allow other family members to follow the branches of the tree in whichever direction they wish.  I started with my dad's male line - which peters out pretty quickly at my great-grandfather - so I continued on with my paternal great-grandmother, following her male line back to the 1600's, when a man named Richard Baildon (who changed the spelling of his name to "Belding" when he was recorded as arriving in Connecticut in 1635) was the first of the line to set foot on American soil.

Sometimes, when first finding information on my forefathers, little things slide by until I start to search for proof of what others have posted as the God's Honest Truth.  One of those little details slid home unexpectedly yesterday.....

7 generations back from my great-grandmother, there is a man named Samuel Belding, the son of Richard, who, according to some of these people who have recorded information without researching it, was born in America in 1632.  (Quite the feat to be born here when his parents didn't arrive in Connecticut until 3 years after his birth, no?)  When recording the information - with a disclaimer that I'm still looking at the records for this particular person - I noted that his wife and youngest son have the same date for their death.

While it's not unusual for the people in early America to have been taken down by some sort of epidemic, there is usually a few days between the deaths, as different people will succumb to a fever or other illness at a different pace.  That these two family members would have died on the exact same date touched off a Sherlock Holmes-style reaction, so I followed the little wiggling leaf on Ancestry.com to see what historical hints anyone else may have posted.

A member story indicated that there was a disaster in the town where the Beldings were living, and when I Googled "September 19, 1677" and the town of Hatfield, Massachusetts, I got this:  Hatfield Massachusetts Indian Attack

I had been questioning why some of the children were born in Hatfield and some were born in other towns.  I had forgotten my American History when trying to deduce why they would have moved out of Hatfield and then moved right back again.  I forgot that the natives in the New World weren't the idealized "good people" who we hear about helping the settlers survive when we hear the story of the first Thanksgiving Feast.....

And the hostility of the native tribes resulted in a 47-year-old woman and her 5-year-old son being killed in an attack that resulted in 12 dead, 4 wounded, and 17 captured.  The hostages were marched up the Connecticut River valley, to Lake Champlain, and onward into Canada.  It took several months for a rescue party to get permission to go after them, and, miraculously, most were able to be rescued and returned to their families.

While I tuck this tale away for the time being, to be researched in further detail at a later time to confirm my ancestor's involvement in this incident, this brought history to life for me.  It's one thing to sit in a classroom in high school or college and listen to such tales about the early days here in America, not really feeling tied to it because of the number of years that have passed.  It's quite another thing to find that one's own relations were forced to move from one stockaded town to another or die at the hands of what may possibly be another group of relations, as there is a rumor of a native American ancestor somewhere in the mix of my genes.....

It may prove very interesting to find out which tribe attacked Hatfield - and which tribe the rumored "Indian in the Woodpile" came from....

In the meantime, I've given the family members who asked me to post this a little something to think about.  I'm hoping that, like me, they find the past reaching out to touch them more personally than it ever has before, urging other, younger family members to take up this gauntlet and continue this research after I join my ancestors on the other side of the ethereal veil.

Perhaps I'll be leaving an interesting legacy after all......