You came back! I am really happy you decided to get to know our created family. My name is Jane and most of family is near me in the Northeast. But we do have family in many other places, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the West Coast and Canada. I think my desire to have a large family around me stems from the fact that I was adopted into a family full of people who had suffered great loss of people they loved. I was raised by a State Trooper who was one of eight. Twins, MY DAD, and then 5 others behind him. His loss began when he was a teenager and his brother, just a year younger than him and his best friend, died in his arms at his family home in Cambridge, MA. He went on to lose two of his sisters in a housefire started by an arsonist when he was in the army and in Europe during WWII. He married my mother who lost her mother when she was just a teenager. They had a son, he had Cystic Fibrosis, and died, also in my father's arms, when he was 5 years old. Because he had CF, they applied to adopt another child instead of conceiving another, when he was about two years old. A baby girl was placed in their home. At the time a child was placed for 11 months (mandatory) and then the adoption could be finalized. Before that time ran, the agency took her away because they found she was a type 1 diabetic, and they felt my parents could not handle two sick children at the same time. So, within a year they lost them both.
Then they adopted me, in 1966 when I was about 10 weeks old. When I was 3, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, underwent a radical mastectomy and had chemo and radiation. She was considered a cure five years later when I was eight years old. When I was 12, the cancer reemerged in the exact same spot (which even today with all the progress that has been made is not good), she fought but lost her battle when I was a few months shy of 14 years old. So, my poor dad had lost so many, and so much, and was stuck with a 13-year-old girl who was angry and mean and wild. He was on an island by himself, and I did not make his life easy. It took many years but thankfully we were able to work it out. When he passed in 2002, I was 36, and he was my very best friend, my confidant, my hero. He loved me, and my children in his way. Which was Army/Trooper/Irish. Tough, that is what it was, tough. He spoke to us like we were his troops, but even with that, his warmth shone through all the bravado (coverup, I guess, men don't cry). He was born in 1923, lived through a depression, a war, lost his siblings and his children and his wife, and still, he persevered as best he could.
This is getting heavy, and we do not want heavy, but I wanted to explain why my extended, biological, non-biological, created family is so important to me. Life moves too fast and before you know it, you have lost time you will never get back. To combat that, we found a way to slow life down, disconnect and spend time with the people we love. We bought a seasonal camp. IT NEEDS WORK, OMG DOES IT EVER NEED WORK. We have named it CAMP DIRT (which I will explain in another post). The property on which it sits opens again next May 1 (2026), so there will not be pictures of work at camp until then. But the journey of redesigning - to make it perfect for us and all the extended family we love - will be posted as it happens. My first order of business is to gather all the things we need to make it comfortable for us all. Beds, bedding, pictures, things, all the things! I hope you will join me for this journey! The picture is of what I consider a BLANK SLATE which will hopefully be a place of family and love, and fun.
