Art! I wanna hear those stories, too!! Have to see about starting THAT thread, then!

Other treasures: my maternal grandmother broke her writing arm when she was in her 70's. During convalesence, she taught herself to write with the other and wrote out the equivalent of about 120 typewritten pages of her memories of coming to Colorado in a covered wagon, early, early days in Boulder, then moving to the Western Slope with her new husband and having children. She was a schoolteacher and natural storyteller, so she includes all manner of interesting signs of the times; the first telephone, first automobile, etc. Lots of fun things, but also she wrote of the tragedies of the hard life, including the TB which took her two older sisters, Ida and Myrta, in their teens, one of them engaged to be married. My sister has the oil portraits of them, in ornate gilded Victorian frames with the oval glass. Grandma used to have them above the bed in the room my mom and I slept in when we went to visit and I've always loved looking into the eyes of those beautiful great-aunts.

I also have my sister's 50's Girl Scout knife, which she gave me when I was little. No wonder I've always looked up to her, huh?! Besides all of the other neat stuff she's done for me over the years.

One time I went to visit my dad's cousin, the one who is like an aunt to me. She told me to come out into the garage with her, where she opened an old round-topped trunk. She pulled a roll of paper out, about 2 feet wide. When she unrolled it to about 3.5 feet, she told me it was an old photograph of my great-grandparent's ranch, taken by an itinerant photographer, sometime in the 20's or 30's. It is kind of in faded blues, greys and browns, with some white here and there. You can clearly see the three brands which my granddad owned by then, painted on the barn. The very old original log cabin homestead is also shown. She gave me that photo. It is one of the most precious things I own. I also found a postcard of it which was never sent, made from the same photo. When I told my dad about it, he said he remembered his dad was gone the day they took the picture and when saw the final outcome he was really mad that there were no cattle in the picture of what really was a cattle ranch!

In more recent times, we've added to our treasures. One kind of funny thing now is a medal that Rog received from Marcos in the Philipines. He was stationed there during Viet Nam and during one of their worst hurricanes in history. He received the medal and a certificate for service above and beyond etc. When his mom died, his sister sent us some wonderful old pictures of them as children and his parents, plus a lovely silver filigree butterfly pin he'd sent to her when in the Philipines, as well as one letter she'd kept in which he written her about the hurricane. Not having known him until much later, I cherish these glimpses of the young man he was.

Jerry, these are just remarkable threads, Thanks so much.

kat