Return of the Swamp Thing

Those of you who did not grow up in the desert southwest ( that's pretty much just you Junie) may be unfamiliar with the hulking contraption pictured above. In the vernacular it's known as a Swamp Cooler, but is more properly called an "Evaporative Cooler" When I was growing up all the houses had one perched on the roof. Forget Memorial Day as the start of summer, for us it was the servicing of the swamp cooler that heralded the months of summer fun. Its a pretty simple machine; a pump pumps water up to a six armed manifold called a spider that then drizzles the water over fiber mats that line the walls of the cooler, a belt driven fan then draws the air cooled by evaporation down into the duct work of the house and out blows nice cool air. In theory it works...but mechanical failures are frequent, and low humidity is a must. Back in the day we knew how to fix our cooler ourselves and often did, replacing the pump, pads, float valves, spider and belt as needed...but years of living away, I had thought I lost my mad swamp cooler skills. But that proved not to be entirely true, I still managed to replace some parts and I would have been able to claim a complete victory, but the belt was slipping and Mom had to call in the repairman after all, but I got 2 out of three! Still the days of the swamp cooler are numbered. More and more people are installing refrigerated air units and even though I will miss the ego boosts that come from vanquishing the Swamp Thing I am looking forward to an A/C . Those trips up the ladder and onto the roof are getting scarier with each passing year!

Sunshine and Shadow

Now that I have done blocks that represent my ancestry, and my extended family, Its time to move a little closer to home...well a lot closer actually. This is the first block I chose to do to represent me. Its called Sunshine and Shadow. I chose it because my life has been a pretty good mix of both good and bad. As I was thinking on it though I came to realize there are not many in this world, if indeed any at all, who could not say the same thing. We all have our sunshine and shadows. For me, my biggest shadows were losing my dad way too soon, and then an ongoing decades old relationship with cancer. Of course that one also falls in the sunshine column, for who when once diagnosed with cancer would not want to have decades to deal with it, rather years or months. But there are things that land solidly in the sunshine camp, things like my family, my friends and my marriage to a very good man, and our son who makes us proud on a daily basis. I had 14 years with Milford, the best dog ever and a chance to travel the world and live in some amazing places, so when it all shakes out, I can happily say I have had more sunshine than shadow, and hope that is true for all the people I love.

My Epic Journey

A view of my Command Module in the Clubman

Anyone who knows me even just a little knows I don't like to drive. Being a one car family for most of my married life, I did not log a lot of hours behind the wheel and consequently my skill and confidence slowly deteriorated. That all began to change when after five long years we bought the car I had been jones'n for. (or should that read "for which I had been Jones'n)


My little Mini Clubman has got me back on the road and in a big way! Of course it helps that my family is almost all the way across the continent from where I am. That is about the only thing that would motivate me to get behind the wheel of my car and start my epic journey. I drove all the way from South Cackalacka to New Mexico all by myself, a huge undertaking made even more monumental by my deep seated aversion to doing it.


Steve tabbed the road atlas and punched in my addresses in the garmin, I packed up the Clubman including a celebratory bottle of beer to be enjoyed in the hotel in Memphis after my first leg of the journey and off I went. I did fine, not a single glitch or wrong turn. I have to say the weirdest part of the whole journey was stopping for meals and eating by myself...If that's all I have to dread, who knows I may do it again! But for now, I have my eyes on a quilt shop in Charleston. I will just leave the beer in the fridge though and drink it when I get home.

For Ireland

When I was deciding on a block for my Irish roots naturally I thought "Irish Chain!" But the thing with Irish chain blocks is that they really need their neighbors to get the full feel of the pattern. I worried that nobody but me would know that it was an Irish chain block, since it would be standing alone. So what do you do when you want to make something look more Irish than it already does? You slap a shamrock on it of course! I had just learned how to paint on fabrics using oil pastels and I was eager to try it and this provided the perfect opportunity. Not bad for my first time.

Now on to our Irish roots. We have Irish blood in our veins to be sure. Granny said her grandfather was a "full blooded A'rshman" And on Papa's side of the family are the O'Neils, but the family I have been able to trace back the farthest are the Rileys. Grandma Gertrude was a Riley, and this particular branch traces all the way back to the very first Riley's who settled in Colonial America in the Chesapeake bay area. We all knew we had plenty of Irish blood, and we've got the freckles to prove it and I would not be surprised if there are some late comers; refugee's from the potato famine dotting our family tree, but most of our Irish heritage goes back much much further. The family lore that I heard from Uncle Bob, who heard it from his Grandpa Ez Riley was that the Riley's were miners in Ireland and they were recruited to come to America to take advantage of the huge coal deposits. Most of them settled in Kentucky, so perhaps there is a grain of truth to the story. Of course Ezra is also the man who says he was such a skilled Horse trader that he was asked to depart (read banned) from Kentucky. Thats what brought him to Missouri where he met and married Nell Banta. If Grandpa Ezra was such a smooth talker it actually lends more credence not less to the stories of his Irish ancestors. After all, isn't that what we are know for?

What to do for England

When choosing the blocks for my ancestors, I was stumped by what to do for England. I thought English Patchwork, but no, that was the technique I used for Granny's block, and I wanted something different. I finally settled on a Tudor rose not because we have any major Tudor connections, but because its such a quintessentially English motif.

When I was searching out my English ancestors I was not surprised to find a healthy dose of them. I think they are neck and neck with the Dutch as far as how many there are, maybe they even out number the Nederlanders by a few. They are an interesting lot too. Among my English ancestors are Brewsters, and though they did not come over on the Mayflower, they most likely are related to those who did. There is also the interesting case of Nathaniel Ingersoll and Sarah Rice of Salem Massachusetts. They were not related to each other, but both are related to me. Nathaniel in his roll as town magistrate actually brought charges of witchcraft against Sarah for which she was jailed, but thankfully not executed...those wacky Puritans! Speaking of Purtians, you know the famous statue of the Purtian Deacon Samuel Chapin by Agustus St. Gauden, well, he's ours too!...Chapin, not St. Gauden that is. I wonder if my usual love of ancestral foods will make me crave black pudding...nope...aint gonna happen, not even on my birthday.

Dutchman's Puzzle

The Dutchman's Puzzle was chosen for all my Dutch ancestors. In one of those funny little things God likes to do, he plopped me down in the middle of the Netherlands. That's where we were when our son Zach was born . In the very town of Amersfoort that almost 400 years earlier his own ancestors lived and died. Wolphert Gerrets Van Couevenhoven married his wife Neeletje in the church who's shadow we rested in on our trips into town, indeed I have the tower of that very Church worked in Cross stitch tucked away somewhere. We greeted Sinter Klaas at the Koppleport where the Couevenhovens owned a bleaching camp. I lived there for 3 and half years never realizing that I was about as Dutch as a person could get! I wish I had known then that I shared in the history of that amazing little country. We were quite at home there and as with Germany I felt an instant affinity to the people and the food. I also felt a strange connection with the place too. There were times, when I would be overcome with such a strange sense of de ja vu that I found it unsettling and inexplicable! Now I know that maybe it was the hum of genetic memory stirring within. While we have personal reasons for loving Amersfoort, we have links all over the Netherlands, in Utrecht, Gelderland, Friesland too. Our Dutch names are many...Banta, Terhune, Brickers, Fonda,De Ruine,Van Der Stratton,Van Arsdale, Van Houten,Van Der Beek, Van Nuyse,Voorheese, Hegeman and many more. I must not forget our Huegonot forebears who fled to The Netherlands from France, Denyce, Demarest and most notably Jan DeMandeville who was a Doctor in Seventeenth century Nijmegen who eventually succumbed to the plague he was battling. So beloved was he by the town that after he passed they payed to put two of his sons through college and they were named Town Physicians.


Our Dutch roots in America run long and deep, over 15 generations ago our ancestors came with Bedford Stuyvesant and helped him settle New Amsterdam. I like knowing that. I like knowing that my American heritage is my Dutch heritage and vice versa. I wish I had known it while I was living in The Netherlands!

A Nod to Germany

Twice now I have lived in places to which I actually have ancestral ties. I don't mean I lived in the general vicinity, I mean I trod the very streets that my ancestors did over 300 years ago! This may not mean much to Europeans who do it all the time, but for an American, and a westerner and descendant of pioneers that is a rare occurance. Antiquity of that variety is a novelty to us. We either have the very ancient, or the brand new, those are usually our only choices.



Once such place was in Germany. I did not know it then, but I could have gone to the town hall in Kaiserslautern and looked up the records of my own family. We have a lot of German ancestry. Maybe that's why I fell instantly in love with the food, so I guess its fitting that I chose the Dresden Plate pattern for my German block. Growing up one of my favorite dishes was chicken fried steak. Who knew it was really a rahm schnitzel in disguise, or the Gesundheit we reflexivly muttered to one another at the sound of sneeze actually meant something.



One of our earliest German Ancestors in America was Johan Jakob Darner who emigrated from the Rhineland Pfalz in the early 1700s and settled near Fredrick Maryland on a tract of land he named after his home in Germany, "Landau". He is one among many though. We also can lay claim to belonging to the Beiser, Sturm, Pfuster,Sauer,Werneich,Gah, Gloss and Strihl,Specht, Yost, and Everhart families just to name a few. Many more go unidentified. But we carry within us evidence of their existance. Its in our blond hair, our celtic skins, our love of pork and beer and the instant familiarity I felt with Germany . I wonder if Jamie felt it too? So now when we say Gesundheit its more than just a vestige of our German ancestory, it really means something. So Gesundheit- Good health to you!