Heritage: Personal Vintage Family Photos

Brenda's Grandparents on the Farm

Confession: I don’t love gardening, though my tastes have changed since childhood, when the thought of garden-fresh vegetables made me want to hide in the closet. I now love the home-canned goodness my mother prepared! You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted green bean casserole made from home-canned green beans! Just don’t ask me and my non-green thumbs to imitate my mom in the garden. I can’t even grow potatoes, and they are supposed to be easy!

Brenda with Principal Grandma

I mention gardening because farming ran on both sides of my family tree. Both parents were raised on farms. Dad left farming before he married Mom, but they made a home in the country and always planted a garden and raised chickens and ducks. My brother and I were given gardening duties such as picking all the potato bugs off the potato plants, which I thought was incredibly disgusting!

Farming isn’t the only thing both sides of the family had in common; education was another. After Grandma Elva graduated eighth grade, she was asked to be a teacher! (I wish I knew how long she taught, if she indeed did. It may have been until she met and married Grandpa George.) Grandma Dorothy was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, and then a teacher in a consolidated school, and when she retired, she was the principal of a consolidated school. (A consolidated school is a school made up of students and teachers originally from smaller schools that have decided to join together into one larger school.) Grandma Dorothy’s son became a history teacher, and her daughters at one time or another were Sunday school teachers.

I may not have loved farm work, but I have always loved education. Homeschooling my children was such a blessing, as I was able to share my love of learning with them and witness their growth and development personally. One should never stop learning! If I had had the resources, I might have become a professional student. But being an author and editor is the next best thing. With all the reading and research I do, I am always learning something new.

Education: it’s not just a necessity, it’s part of my heritage!