My Brother Ernest

 November 13, 2014

I am honoring my brother this TBT. He is gone now for a few years but he left an indelible dent on my spirit. I wrote this for him when he passed. 

 So many memories of our childhood have found their way to my consciousness. He was 3 years older than me and taught me so many things, like how to make biscuits, how to do the perfect swan dive, (which I could never perfect) , how to ride a bike, then later a motorcycle.

 It is ironic that he loved motorcycles so, and that was what began his demise. I remember when he had his accident and was in a coma for three months, his body broken, his mind gone. My sister and I alternated nights at the hospital so that he would not be alone, if he woke up. He said his first words to me when he came out of the coma. George Wallace was making a run for the presidency and I looked at Ernest and said, "Do you think George Wallace will ever be president?" and he said his first word.. "No".. I repeated the question and he answered again. I ran to get the nurses, as we did not know if he would ever come out of the coma, but he did.

 He over came so much. He was dead on the side of the road when they found him, and the EMT revived him. I am ashamed to say that I have asked God why many times, when his life seemed such a struggle, and then it became clear to me a few days ago.

 My brother was a gift to the world.

In the 37 years since he had his accident, I never saw him any other way than with a smile on his face. When they cut off first one leg and then the other developed problems,  he kept smiling. When he would be sick, he would reassure us that he would be alright. We should have been reassuring him that he would be alright. When he got the first bed sore and had to go to the hospital, he did not complain of pain, he was laughing. When he had to go back for another, he still smiled.

 How can one smile through adversity like that. I think he had to know that to complain would do no good. It would not change his circumstance. He would wake up the next day to the exact same day with the only control that he had, himself, and the way he impacted the world.

 I want to remember the strength that my brother showed the next time I think I am going to complain about my circumstances which mean nothing in the big picture.

 So today, one of gods angels is laid to rest and I cry , but with tears of joy that I knew him and loved him.. Fly away, big brother, be a whole man again, in mind and body, and know that you touched my life in a way that I will never forget... Thank you for being my brother and for letting me be your little sister... Love, Kimmee 

ps.. Just in case you all think he was a saint, this is the same brother that used to stack truck tires around me so that I could not get out for hours.lol. I know that he needed to do this when I would get in his hair. 

He also taught me to make biscuits but I realized later that it was so that he would no longer have to get up at 4 am to make them for Daddy. That fell to me at the age of 8. I laugh at all the memories now and am so thankful to have them:-)

4/10/1950---3/09/2008

Longest Covered Bridge in The US

November 13, 2020

We have had so many wonderful experiences here in Northeast Alabama. These gently rolling hills and mountains were such a surprise to me and I just love it. 

Yesterday we saw the longest covered bridge in the US at 270 feet long and Wendi and I walked all the way across it. Casey did not want to walk as you could see through the cracks of the wood at the water and ground below but we loved it. The smell of 100 year old wood is so amazing. The swirling clear spring below was just so beautiful. The red Mill is still there reminding us of days long past. 

We have less than a week left here in Arley, Al and I can say that this is a beautiful part of the world and I wish you all could see it with us. 

Jenny went to the waterfall, the only one of us to traverse over the rocks to see it and I was so proud of her for making it.

Some of us are afraid right now. Covid has paralyzed life as we once knew it but I hope that you will find a way to get outside in nature. It's so healing and calming to my spirit and I know that it will calm you too. 

I love y'all with all my heart and am taking each of you with me to see the world we live in. A short week and we will be going toward Texas. I'm enjoying each new day and being with my family while exploring this great country we live in. Yes, a lot of things are wrong about it but yes, a lot of things are right about it . Seek the things that calm you, bring you some sense of peace and nurture all that is good inside each of us. I'm doing just that as we travel and hope that you will too. I love you. Always, Kimmee.

My DNA cousin Benjamin Franklin

 I've been wondering how Benjamin Franklin and I are kin ever since my DNA was done a few years ago and today with the new app that ancestry calls "We're Related" ,  I found out. 

I am over joyed to know the how of it. 

It is through my paternal Peacock/ Pearson line and we are 5th cousins 7 x removed.... 

Call me tickled!!! 

💜

I have known for sometime through my DNA but I did not know how,  until today.. This is the lineage.. Benjamin Franklin  5th cousin 7 x removed through the Peacock/Pearson lines

Gloria Peacock Kimmel

Elmore Lee Peacock

Lucious LeeRoy Peacock

James Hardy Peacock 

Levi Peacock Jr

Jemima Pearson.. Mother of Levi Jr

Jonathan Pearson

Peter Pearson

Christopher Pearson

Elizabeth Wilson ... Mother of Christopher Pearson

Peter Wilson

Anne Sherman.. Mother of Peter Wilson

Susan Renee Lawrence.. Mother of Anne Sherman

John Lawrence... common Ancestor of myself and Benjamin Franklin.. John Lawrence is my 12th great Grandfather and he is Benjamin Franklin's 5th Great Grandfather. I already had him in my tree. I just did not realize that this was the connection I was seeking.. So thankful to know how..

A Trip to Fairplay SC and The Bear

 Nov 5th, 2020

Hi dear friends, we are on a 3 day trek to Alabama from Northern Virginia and tonight we stopped in Fairplay, SC. How gorgeous it is here and what a great find in this beautiful part of our country. 

Jenny was making us a campfire so we could sit and watch the sunset and this fella  was in the basket of wood left behind. It was there to be put in the fire but when Jenny saw it and showed it to me, we knew this was never going to make the woodpile. 

I love the bear and wish I had Patrice Mayberry's skill to make him into a standing bear. Since I don't,  he will be my mascot and now will travel everywhere we go. 

I hope that everyone is doing alright. I know times seem uncertain right now but be reassured that tomorrow the light will come. We will wake up, take a few deep breaths and do what Americans have been doing for generations, say thanks for a brand new day full of possibilities.. 

I love you all and pray that the rest of your day is blessed. Deep breathe and relax. We got this.  Always, kimmee

The Ghost House

Many of you have read about the home that I had and as Halloween is approaching, I thought I would share the story of a haunted house.

I did some research on my house in Upstate NY and found that our ghost had occupied the home before. Yes, I said Ghost. I know that many will not believe and that is ok. I did not either, but I came to believe when I saw the evidence of them living in the house with us. They scared my children and sometimes me, if I wasn't expecting them but through research I found out why they were still here. Their daddy had died here and he was a McCurdy and I was a McCurdy kin, so I was family.

They showed us many times that we were not alone. Children would scream to go home at night and they stopped coming at all because it was noisy at times. A child would call for daddy, a grandma would rock the baby in the rocking chair and the 1900's dressed woman would just stand there wringing her hands. I believe she was grieving. I know that the child was looking for Daddy but he had died in the house, and they were tied to the house because of it.

When my nephew and his wife visited, I don't remember telling them about the ghost but after a few nights they told me. We were so used to the noises of the house that we barely noted it, but someone new would take notice of it and mention it , and they did. My niece came to me and said someone pushed on her chest last night. I had never heard of them actually causing a touch sensation anyone and was intrigued. She said it wasn't hurting her but it was touching her chest and pressing down some in the night. I don't know what that meant or means but I don't feel that they meant her any harm. It only happened once perhaps to ask them to stay longer to help me.

My experiences with the ghosts were usually the Grandmother or at least with the woman dressed in black and she was older so I called her Grandmother. She rocked the baby often in the antique rocking chair with lions heads that I had in the living room. It literally rocked by itself. Now I wondered if it were on an unlevel spot to the old wooden floors, so I would move it and it would happen again. It was disconcerting to see it rock so I moved it upstairs and you could still hear it rock. I wasn't often up there but you could still hear or see it sometimes.

I only saw them twice. Once I was in the living room sitting on the couch, trying to warm up in front of the wood stove and they, the grandmother, the younger woman and child were all standing at the doors to the formal dining room. That is what it was used for in years past but I used it for my doll room. They did not stay long, just long enough for me to see the woman in black, the lady in white and the child. My oldest daughter often heard the boy calling for his daddy and she saw him once in her room. The time that I saw he was sitting in the lap of the Grandmother and was being rocked.

I was married at the time to someone that was not a kind person. He had no empathy and one day when I was at work my daughters dog that was old and sick, was killed by him. He even called me at my Nurses job to tell me that Lady was dead of lead poisoning. I was distraught but as Nurse Manager could not leave to do anything. I cried at work and my DON asked what was wrong and I told her, that our dog died. I did not tell her the circumstances for I didn't know what the consequences of doing that would be at home for me or my children.

Lady them became a ghost in the house. I had not heard of animals becoming ghosts but they absolutely do. I could hear her slow tap tap tap of her nails on the stairs coming up or down, just as she did in life; She did in death. He sentenced her to being there for I don't know how long. I know that she was there when I sold the home.

Pictured you will see the Lions head rocker. I sent it to Auction when I had to sell all my stuff but I had brought it south with me and it never rocked so I know that it rocked in the upstate house only. The Ghost may still be there for all I know. I haven't been back to the house. I know that other people knew about the Ghost in our house because the author of the book, "Haunted Houses Of Upstate NY" wanted to add our story to the book and I declined. I knew that adding a home to a book such as this created curiosity in the public and I was trying to raise a family. I wanted to do that without being in the limelight of ghost hunters.

I think about that life up there often and how it shaped my world for almost 20 years. It was not easy but it had its moments. I have long ago forgiven myself for staying in the situation. People that are in abusive situations sometimes stay longer than an outsider thinks that they should. I am here to tell you that we leave when we know how too, or feel safe too.
Our physical selves have long left the house I loved with all my heart, but I think that some of me still resides in the soil. That same soil where medicine bottles, dolls, marbles and toys were found, waiting for a Nurse, doll collector, and child that played with marbles and cars as a child.

The Great Ice Storm of '98

It was January 4th of 1998 and although it was cold at 38 degrees, it wasn't 30 degrees below zero as in past winters, so we weren't complaining.  Living in DePeyster Ny,  is not for the faint of heart. From the time we pulled our 24 foot moving truck into the snow covered driveway in 1989 until this day, we had weathered so many hardships. 

Bailing the septic tank every week, no indoor toilet for 2 years, water pump frozen so that we were without water for 3 weeks. We used frozen ice,  melted and boiled,  but it wasn't enough to stop all of us from contracting Beaver Fever. It hit all of us hard but because I was thin at 110 lbs, losing 20 lbs made me look like death warmed over. For 9 days, we all excreted fluids from all orifices in our bodies. I was too weak to eat or drink and became severely dehydrated. We had no medical insurance.  so none of us went to the doctor. My 4 yr old and 15 yr olds were sick but not like I was. I may have already had the autoimmune that took me out 15 yrs later but I was not worried about that then. I thought I was going to die and when I started hallucinating and saw a golden dragon, my husband thought I might too, but he did not take me to the Dr.  

Somehow I survived and I told my husband I was calling someone to fix the pump. He had said we weren't going to call anyone because of the money and that he would fix it but he got sick along with the rest of us and he could not fix it, so I went against the grain and called the guy who used a blow torch and we had water in a few minutes for 20 dollars. All that suffering for 20 dollars.  

This was to be the framework for all of the troubles that happened over the next 18 winters in the North Country and January 1998 was going to stand out from all of those.  It was slated to be the worst ice storm of the Century with icy rain falling for 80 days over Montreal and other parts of Canada and northern Ny all the way to Maine. We were hit hard, every one was and as the ice brought power lines to the ground our power went along four Million others. 

One thousand transmission towers fell under the hard ice as temperatures dropping below freezing caused the rain to freeze as solid as an ice skating rink,  5 inches thick and damaging every tree, every structure that fell under the weight and the electricity was a thing of the past, as every thing literally ground to a halt

I had been skating across the parking lot to go into work the day of the ice storm but my shift ended and I made it home which was prophetic because as day turned into night, all traffic was halted except for emergency personnel and I was home for the duration. As a nurse, I was considered essential personnel so I was able to go to the little country store in DePeyster and stock up on a few things to get us through. Luckily  my husband was a person that stocked up on things. Guns, ammo, canned food and water, learning from out first year and the Beaver Fever scare, so we had what we needed mostly.  We took every thing out of our freezer and buried it in the snow before the ice covered every thing. It was a built in freezer and we did not lose anything from the hard work of the summer months and hunting season.  If you wanted cold water, all you had to do was stick a gallon outside for a little bit and you had perfectly cold drinking water. 

We did not have a furnace like most homes did in this part of the world. When ours belched black smoke into the house and died two days after our arrival in 1989, we had no jobs yet and there was no money to get another. When I started work, I wanted to get another but my husband vetoed the idea and said he would gather wood for the tiny wood stove we had in the living room. It was not one of those Amish models that heat the entire house. It was so small that we had to re-stoke it every hour or so and we went through about 60 cords of hard wood and 40 cords of pine, cedar and end cuts from the sawmill down the road.

 

I know that sounds like an enormous amount of wood and it was and we needed that much to provide a marginal amount of warmth in three rooms in the  first level of my home. The living room, the bedroom directly above it and the dining room was warm. The rest of the house was cold, icy cold. My children could not touch the walls because ice was inside on the walls and they might stick to it. The door handles often had ice on them. All of the nails in the bathroom were white with ice. It was a cold, intolerable and miserable way of life and I did not let anyone at work know or in my personal life. I  hid it all behind a smile to be strong for my children, to try and give them some semblence of a normal life but I was failing badly and not having a furnace set us up for all those winters where we froze almost to death. 

Sometimes the blankets were piled so high on my daughters that I thought they might smother underneath them but it was the only way to keep them warm.  

On this particular month, I came to be eternally grateful that we had that working woodstove. The temperature had warmed up and turned the rain to ice. Thick sheets of it that made it impossible to walk outside in,  yet we had to, as the wood barn was a trek from the house. I can't count the times we fell in the next two weeks.  We heard the branches fall underneath the weight of the ice and the beautiful pine tree in our front yard fell over but missed the car. The tires of the car were stuck in solid ice so there was no contemplating moving it. The ice covered the vehicle like a car cover and it was so thick that it looked like an ice sculpture. 

We pulled mattresses into the living room and we pretty much lived in one room for the next 8 days that we were without electricity. One of my old  Nursing instructors showed up the second or third day in one of the busses from the school with emergency supplies such as water, canned foods and fruit. She did this for every house on our road and I am sure many others. The people of Heuvelton came together as they always do because that is who they are. If there is one in need, the community helps. It is a wonderful way to be. 

Finally the icy rain stopped and the linemen arrived on our road to try and get the electricity going. When the truck stopped at our house, I screamed with happiness and went to the front door and yelled out my thanks to them. They were from Ohio and after working in that cold for an hour, I took hot cocoa to the crew. I was so appreciative of what they were doing for all of us. They got our electricity going that day and was preparing to leave but the electricity wasn't to our water pump.  I went outside as best I could and called to them before they could finish packing up and leave. They went back to work and this time before they left, they made sure we had water.    

I tried to get into my car to start it to melt the ice on the windshield but the lock where the key went was solid Ice. I kicked it in an attempt to break its hold and broke my toe.  I had to go to work so I slipped my Nursing shoe over it and went to work. I had been off work for 8 days and I needed to get in there to see my staff and the residents.  Some of them had to stay for long shifts because they were in town and those of us in outlying areas could not make it into town until the crews were able to get the trucks on the roads to make it safe for all of us to travel. 

I was thinking of all the Hurricane and all those linemen working on the Panhandle right now when I wrote this. I can't say how much it meant for me to see them on our road during the ice storm. They worked in the cold all day as long as it was light trying to bring our power back on. It was not an easy task as the ice covered every thing and some of the wires were on the ground encased in thick ice. We were only 8 days without but it took a month for some of the areas to be in the light again. I was so thankful and I know how thankful the people of Florida are right now to have them working all day trying to help. 

I have never seen such an outpouring of caring than I have seen during this disaster. People coming from many counties in Florida and surrounding states to help. Unsung heroes whose names we will never know. God bless them and all of the people struggling right now.  I pray for you all every day... Always, Kimmee

( I don't have photos of that time on my computer anymore. I lost my first computer that I had and many pics were gone.I have many pictures of some of the hardships we endured there. It was not for the faint of heart.  Here is the article about that time for you all to see some of the devastation) 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_1998_North_American_ice_storm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIl2FTv5tAY

 

Chesapeake Bay Beach

 ***WARNING long****

Good morning dear friends.

There are a lot of pictures to see today and this was not all of them that my daughter and I took. It was a glorious day going to the Chesapeake bay beach area. It was the one thing my daughter wanted to do and we did not know what kind of walk this was going to be for me but I made it. 

It was extraordinarily beautiful and I hope that you all get to go along with us. I love you all so much and take you with me in my heart everywhere we go. 

(I have to recount a couple of things that happened. We passed several people on the 1.2 mile hike and when one of them saw me sitting on the beach on my Walker, she said to me," you made it" and I said "yes, I did."

Another group saw an elderly woman sitting on a Walker as the tide came in, all alone as everyone else had gone to the point and they seemed concerned for me like they were worried I was there to end it all. 

But I wasn't there to look on what this year has been or to look back in any way. They only way that I made that walk, cause the trail was impossible, was by stepping one foot in front of the other. My daughter asked on the way back, " do you want to stop and rest?" and I replied" no,if I do I won't be able to keep going". That is what we have to do. No matter what challenges we may have especially now, we have to keep stepping forward and not looking back, so that we make it. It was a huge struggle for me yesterday and I would not have made that trek without Wendi and Casey, (Jenny's niece) helping me. Wendi carried my Walker and Casey helped shove me up the dunes by holding my back and giving me the power to go up them and to walk in that sifting sand. )

I love you all more than I can say. I will be continuing my recovery today but I can say, I made it. Just as that one lady said to me on the beach. I made it and you all will make it and we will do that together. I carry you all in my heart. Always, kimme