Funeral Day......

It is a spring sky showing out there. We are not so warm but this is good. The trees are not budding and yet my pussy willow tree is budded. It really is the first to do so every year.

Some of my southern blogger friends are seeing tulips popping up but that is too early for us. The front yard is still brown while the back yard is green. I can hear cardinals doing territorial calls and I did hear a song that sounded like a wren.  It may not have been as it seems too early for them.

I didn't destroy my bonsai. I do need to trim it again. It has one shape problem at the top with a branch crossing over another one. That is not suppose to happen.  I can go in now and trim more big leaves back as there are a lot of small ones on it.  It still bothers me that I don't know what the soil structure is and I can't judge what the root structure looks like.  I water it a little every three or four days.

Our neighbor Judy passed away and we attended her funeral yesterday. She has been the neighbor there since 1976 and a closer neighbor in the 90's.  Her husband died in 1994 and she buried him in the cemetery of a extinct coal mining town east of Woodward.  I never really understood why she had him buried there we were at the cemetery yesterday. 

I don't know the exact years of the town or cemetery but it was first established before Woodward was settled. (In 1879, Xenia contained a post office, a blacksmith shop, and a schoolhouse). The train stopped at Xenia first and they got water for their steamers there.  They did find it to be difficult for the steamers to stop there and they had real struggles to make it up the hill from a stand still.  Eventually they added a water station at the top of the hill and the trains could roll up the hill and stop there.  That was why Woodward, Iowa was established.


We have known Judy and Bill for years.  I had all of her kids in school..  The oldest graduated the year that I moved there. Judy was 80 years old.  She had battled a lot of different health problems and survived them but the lunIg cancer was too much.

The funeral was like a distant family reunion though, as Judy talked about all of her family members all of those years. We knew all about her kids and her grand kids.  We helped her through the loss of two of her sisters, the one passingjust a few years ago.  Judy lost her oldest son three or four years ago from cancer.  The one nephew that we had heard about was there.  Genetics is a strange system but we met the nephew who was like a twin brother to Judy's oldest son.  Judy had a grandmother who was full Lakota, Native American Indian. Judy's first son looked native American. Her sister's only son also looked like a Native American.  I really had to meet George, the guy with the Indian profile and a twinkle in his dark brown eyes.

It would have made Judy so happy for us to meet George.  George and his wife live at the base of one of the bluffs near Council Bluffs in Iowa. His wife is on television as PBS follows thire goat herds and the cheese making that she manages. They also grow large gardens along the base of those loess hills.

I have so much more to share about that early century cemetery.  All of the miners are gone, moved to Moran, Iowa in the early days, as the Zenia mine shut down. A lot of them were Italians and some other smaller European countries.  I will just share later.  It was cool, sunny, but windy out at the cemetery.  We both are home resting today.  Thanks for stopping by today.