Magnet

February 25:

We have Friends who just recently had a beautiful Baby Girl. After the Family came home from the Hospital, we took them a Buffalo Roast. Preparing such Feasts for special moments of Family Transition was our Custom when we lived up North. I have not done much of that here. I just hadn't as yet found my "Place".

Preparing the Feast for little Alexis and her new Parents felt very good. And it came with some unexpected surprises and connections, which had little to do with her Family and everything to do with ours.

Richard and I took the Feast over to the New Family who live in a House on North Main in Kirksville. It takes some "thinking" to get there as it is not a straight shot off Main which goes through the downtown area. I had been there 2 times before. It is an area of town which is not familiar at 1st glance. But this time, I looked and thought a little harder. Somehow, some unseen magnet was pulling me Home.

When I was growing up and for many decades before, the Wabash Railroad would have been behind their House. With the reduction in Rail Lines and Trains over the years, those Tracks have been pulled. Something kept drawing my eyes and my attention to the West. Once there, my eyes just kept sweeping outward.

As I thought a little harder, the unfamiliar became the familiar. We have a lot of Family History in those blocks of the "North End". We have in our Family the 1919 Plat Map of Adair County. I pulled it out to get a sense of that area of Kirksville during some of those years.

The pencil marks the Home Place of my Great Grandparents Frederick and Matilda (Waibel) Brenz. Marking the 1st known connection of our Family to the area, they would have settled there at least by the 1870s. Our last connection to the area was when the property was sold at the passing of the last of their Children (Della and Clara) in 1968.

In that roughly 100 year period, other Family Members wove their lives into those Neighborhoods and walked those Streets.

In the meantime, the Dinner Bell has sounded and I shall stop this little entry, because more will unfold. For the record, we do have a Dinner Bell, but we use it to call in the Family to the House. No such thing was needed here. I am off to Dinner, with eager thoughts ahead on this little project.