Eventually

 My Uncle Steve, Mom's baby brother, passed away just over a week ago.  He's the one in the back, on the far right.  His dementia was worse than my mom's over the course of the last couple years and following a series of mini strokes, he went to heaven. 

I had another uncle that died in a car crash when I was pretty young.  Another uncle about ten years ago, then Mom and Dad's deaths two years ago and now Steve. sigh.

His wife, Janice, was my nurse at the hospital where I was born.  Mom grilled her about her life and when Steve came in to see Mom and meet me, Mom said, Hey, ask that nurse out for coffee!

And the rest was history...

Three kids, ten grandkids later...

When we were kids, he would hire us kids to help sell sweetcorn.  That was about the time it was $1 a dozen.  I'm "a dollar a dozen" years old.

Needless to say, it sells for a lot more now.

Every Christmas, Steve tied Christmas tree branches onto a very heavy wire and let it hang in scallops across the front of the church.  It smelled "heavenly" and looked gorgeous.

Oh, This was the Janice that Mom always used for a scapegoat to get us kids to clean the house properly.

"Janice is coming over and she ALWAYS looks behind couches to see if we stash stuff there!"

and the closets and under our beds.

We grew up thinking she was an incredible snoop! LOL!

But being a mom now for almost 30 years, I totally get why Mom said that.

I've lied to my kids before too.

Sorry though Janice!  You don't deserve that!

It was great at the viewing, to hear cousins remember things that we didn't about him. I guess since we lived so close we didn't stay for a week at a time with their family and find out that they made a pool out of a previously toxic chemical barrel or how Steve's tractor's brakes gave way on his super steep hill and crashed and how he was determined and got it working again.

I guess when you live in the same town and see them every day at our church school, you can get a bit annoyed with them.  Steve was pretty stubborn.  I guess I know where he got it. Mom... :)  Well, actually Grandpa.

Dad would come home from a church meeting where Steve was too, all angry, because well, Dad was stubborn too. :)

And only one more story about Steve's attitude.  He taught PE at my church school and I don't remember why, but I said, "Well, that's just PEACHY!!!!!"  I was angry about something...  I probably got hit with a ball and I didn't/don't swear. much.  That was about as bad as it got.

Well, Steve hadn't heard that term before and asked me what that meant.

Ummmm  sarcasm??!

I had to sit out the rest of PE in my desk...

whoops!

Seeing so many of my cousins was great!   About 50% made it.  I had 3 other cousins there that were born the same year as me and we were always the closest.  Julie, my favorite cousin "not a secret", Jonathan and Danny. Well, he's Dan now.  

I guess you have to be when you're married with kids, grandkids and a farm.

Robb smoked two 8 pound pork butts and we made pulled pork the night before and brought it.  That and a bunch of other food brought by the family at the pot luck filled up everyone and then we went out to the cemetery about an hour away.

Steve is buried right between my maternal grandparents and his in-laws.  They must have been close friends when they bought their plots.

Mom and Dad's headstone looked so cold a little ways away.

Robb and I got there first behind the hearse and a cousin, Scott, was right behind us.  No one had plowed the cemetery and the hearse almost got stuck.  So it was single file all the way around the lanes.  Everyone had to walk a ways.  well, except us.

Scott told us how they thaw the ground for a grave digging and how they did it back in the day before gas powered engines.  Interesting!! I have no idea how he knows this...

I got to see three sisters and my brother as well as a lot of nieces, nephews and lots of grandnieces and grandnephews.  Our family was well represented.

It was a beautiful snowy day with lots of sun and no wind, or it would have been miserable out there.

I walked one of my aunts back to her car to keep her from slipping on the snow/crushed up ice.

Her voice is a lot lower than my mom's but dang if it didn't make me tear up because I could hear Mom's voice in it...

Anyway.  Steve's in heaven now.  Janice is going to be just fine.

eventually.