The column comes this week from Harwinton and Wendy, Jean’s youngest daughter. Mom is not feeling well and I offered to take a stab at what she and my sister, Laurie, have been doing for many years!

Most of the family has inherited mom’s love of nature and especially the birds. I was sure to get out two days before our big storm this week and overfill all the feeders. Birds are instinctive meteorologists and like to fill up when a storm is approaching, and fill up they did on Sunday! The storm started Monday with mostly sleet all day here in Harwinton, and I saw very few birds. By Tuesday, however, they were fighting over feeder posts. I have one of those acrylic feeders attached to my kitchen window that was a gift from Mom for Christmas several years ago. I was greeted that morning by a female cardinal who was brave and desperate enough to be sitting right in that window feeder, a refuge from the snow that was to continue all day. What a treat to see that beautiful bird so close – they are usually too timid to feed anywhere but on the ground. After a while, the blue jays came along and chased her away. They look so big in that little feeder! I was afraid their weight might knock it off the window, but it is still holding.

What a snowy winter we have had. My daughter, Megan, was intensely tracking the weather stations and was so excited at the prospect of a day home from school, she couldn’t get to sleep. I keep teasing her that if we get too many more storms this year, she will be attending school in July! I am able to keep in close touch with son, Ben, at Quinnipiac College. With the advent of the Internet and e-mails and instant messaging, along with cell phones and beepers, storms like the one we had this week are not nearly as scary as the ones Mom remembers in her youth. Ben found out on Sunday that his classes were canceled on Monday and made arrangements to work at the Ansonia ambulance, where they were happy to have another driver and EMT on hand for any extra emergencies that might arise. Michael took advantage of the time at home from the office during the storm to play with his new photo program on the computer and to brush up on his guitar. Some folks are born, I believe, with an instinct for certain things and I am amazed to watch one of his hands plucking away while the other hand races through the chords; I don’t think I could ever master that skill. I sure do enjoy listening and singing along, though!

I am at home for a few weeks, recuperating from surgery. I dug out some stuff from the attic and cellar beforehand for projects that I could keep occupied with. Boxes and boxes of paperwork, scrapbook memories, and pictures filled my dining room. I started with the paperwork. Twenty years worth of receipts, statements, tax documents, and records got reduced to a nice neat file cabinet of folders with the most important and recent documents nicely organized. Then I moved on to the fun part of the project, the pictures. Twenty years of pictures are much more difficult to organize when you didn’t heed your mother’s advice and date the back of them as they were developed. I must have had at least 2,000 pictures that were in such a mess. I neatly organized them into several shoeboxes and then wrote a year on 20 file folders. Then, picture by picture, I put them in the proper year’s folder. Luckily, many of the pictures had been date-stamped by the developer. As I reviewed the ones that were not date-stamped, it was a process of elimination. Which house did we live in at the time? What season was it? How long or short was the child’s hairstyle at the time? Finally, I went through each folder and tried to put each year in some semblance of order and put them into photo albums with acid free pages. I now have six photo albums containing about 350 pictures each, nicely arranged. Only about half of the total pictures went into the albums and the other half are saved with index cards between each year, in shoeboxes. Someday, when Ben and Megan get out on their own and settled I will easily be able to put albums together for them, too. What a terrific feeling! I was so glad to get this project done, and to get some of the old photos out of those albums with the sticky pages that do not preserve them properly.

A trip through old pictures is a trip down memory lane. The yearly Easter egg hunts at the lovely field near Mom’s Heritage Village condo. The annual Christmas Eve family tradition of first Ben, when he was little, and then joined by Megan, lighting the little Swiss chime candles that caused the bells to ring. First day of school pictures; prom pictures; graduation pictures; birthday parties; school trips and family trips. My journey through these memories has reminded me of just how rich and lucky I am to have been part of a wonderful family legacy. Now, it’s on to the pile of ironing that has been growing during my journey!

I’ll let Mom fill you in on the author of last week’s quote later. Until then, I’ll leave you with a thought that I keep posted on my refrigerator, attributed to Oprah Winfrey: “Luck is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.”