The story of us, part two

 

A good Goode family. 

On April 4th my oldest sister in law would have turned 74. But she died at 56 of heat stroke while hiking in the Grand Canyon. When I first met her baby brother, he was living with her and her husband. I called the handsome college kid. I was hoping to carpool with and she answered the phone saying “this is April“ and my heart sank, thinking he’s living with a woman.
Over the next decades, sometimes they lived close to us. Sometimes they lived 3000 miles away, but they ended up being the best of friends to my husband and I  - and the good aunt and the evil uncle to our boys.
She had moved to my hometown, but my husband’s family actually lived across the state of Wyoming and the first time he took me home to meet his family. I was terrified. He told me if I love you. They’re gonna love you. I wasn’t sure I believed him.
But that’s how it went. His family became my family and my mom told me that if we ever got divorced, she was keeping Greg. 
This picture from 2000 was my husband‘s parent’s 50th wedding anniversary, they actually ended up married 66 years but I love this picture because it was the first time that the whole family had been born or married into the family and while everybody was still healthy.
The 2022 picture had to be cobbled together because not everyone could be there. It was after the oldest sister had died, and at a memorial service for the second oldest sister,  both my mother and father-in-law had died by then and within a year my sister-in-law Fran, would also die. The oldest grandchild had died when he was hit by a train, so his mother’s memorial service was also filled with memories of him. 
That second picture was missing five people from the first photo but my three grandchildren and the spouses of several of my nieces and nephews had been added so the family continued strong.

Northwest Community College 

While he was doing choir and theater, I was taking creative writing and painting classes. We both loved the sciences so I took extra biology, oncology and genetics for fun and he took chemistry because he was good at it, but I went to every performance of his shows and he read my poems and inspired most of them. We made friends in the poetry classes and in the art building and the theater whom we would have for the rest of our lives. 

Meeting Family roots

My Grandma grew up here but ended up going to Wyoming to her sister’s wedding, and staying to marry her sister’s husband’s brother. One other sister died young of a ruptured appendix, one brother died in a military hospital in the Philippines after surviving the Bataan Death March, and one brother died as an infant. The two remaining brothers and my great grandmother ran a Dairy/hog farm in rural northern Illinois. My childhood summers were often including a few weeks  spent running loose on the farm while mom and grandma did a deep clean on the farmhouse. I loved the dairy and riding on the tractors in the bucket while bringing a new born calf back to the barn.