Recap - -
My mother died near the end of last May. I live in central California. She lived in Idaho. I have two sisters. There was coordinating and travel and more coordinating needed before we could begin to deal with her things. She had been trying to go through things, but was not a person who easily threw things away. And she had been married twice, both times to people who tended to accumulate things that might be useful later.
At the beginning of last October my Dear Son and his Divoted Girlfriend brought back the last of the things that we were either going to keep or that needed to be sorted through in depth and couldn't just be chucked. They came home driving a van and a truck with the truck pulling a rented U-Haul trailer. All three vehicles were stuffed with boxes and other things.
I've been sorting ever since. The boxes over-stuffed our small garage and got mixed with our storage boxes. It's been hard to tell how close I was to getting everything sorted.
Yesterday I brought in what I thought might be the last two boxes. There was something that I was dreading. You see, there were a couple of things that I knew I'd packed to be brought home that I hadn't found, yet. One was a certificate that just tickled me. If it wasn't in one of those two boxes, then either there was another box that we hadn't found, yet, or there was a box that had gotten mislaid.
Last night I found the certificate that I had packed in Idaho. I am chuffed to know that these are the very last two boxes to sort through. Well, the last two with photos and papers. There are at least three boxes with green decorative glass and small corning ware lidded casseroles. I'm not worried about what might happen to them if they stay in the garage unsorted, though, so they almost don't count.
You have to admit, that's a cool certificate. This is my great great grandmother. The 1920 census lists her as a metaphysical healer, so she was still at it 25 years after being certified. She also left a journal that only had four entries in it (my heritage! none of my forebears ever completed a journal or album), one of which talks about the magnetic therapy she was doing.
Cool beans, Great Great Grandma Archibald. (She married after getting the certificate and was thereafter no longer Sister L. M. Bates.)
