Hotoncubelandia
Tuesday, April 15th, 2025This was the view sometime in the mid to late morning. It was a very blustery day and I was glad to be in a modern house instead of the moldy old cFam cabin as much as I loved that old place.
I remember hanging around with the Gumper (my father-in-law) listening to him talk about various things. Lake levels and the Dam Man. Stories about serving as the master mechanic on the Hornet aircraft carrier in the south Pacific. He would tear up a wee bit talking about the pilots that got billeted with him that never came back. On a lighter note, there was this mathematical conversation in which I set him straight about something, mainly, that I wasn’t all that bad at math.
Gumper: KW, do you know what a parabola is?
KW: Why yes! I know all the conic sections.
That pretty much stopped him from asking me mathematical questions although he did sometimes ask me some nosy questions but that was what he was all about. He also once divulged some (sorta) NSFW information to me, which eventually earned me the title “The Family Liberal” from another out-law. That is all I will say about that except that I loved him and think he liked and trusted me. And make no mistake, it was not anything sordid at all.
So, a few years after the Gumper died, a quintet of his children bulldozed the moldy old place and rebuilt it. So I took this picture out the window from where I was working today. Large Catholic families are one of my lots in life and I am blessed to be a part of this one, non-Catholic that I am.
P.S. The GG found Coal Miner’s Daughter was on TV tonight, miraculously with no commercials. A great film and when I was young, random strangers would sometimes tell me I looked like “Carrie”, aka Sissy Spacek, who plays Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter. Just a fun fact.