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Category: personal

A house built with love

Now that all the relatives have been informed, I am free to share the sad news that Violet “Pat” Byrd Stribling has passed away.

Grandma Pat died a few days ago, peacefully in her sleep and in the company of family. She was my mother’s stepmom and my last surviving grandparent, so the sadness I feel at the time of her passing is a selfish one, as a generation of my family is now gone, their stories continuing only in our memories.

But as Uncle Mark points out, Grandma Pat is now reunited with the love of her life, Papa Ivan. They were married in a chapel in Yosemite National Park, which was Papa Ivan’s favorite place. An Eagle Scout, he led generations of Boy Scouts to their merit badges in the shadows of Yosemite’s mountain cliffs, and took me and my sister on our first camping trip in Yosemite, if my long-thin childhood memory serves me. I remember the chill of the morning sunlight, and Papa Ivan showing me Half-Dome. 

 

Papa Ivan and Grandma Pat lived in Merced, California, the city of my birth. Whenever we would return to the hometown to visit my mother’s family, there would always be a day of adventures with Grandma Pat. I remember she had a dog that scared the heck out of me, as most dogs did when I was young. My sister remembers her ice cream floats with Tab soda, which is a memory I cannot recall, honestly. Her house was eclectic and fun, and she showered us with love. 

Pat was fond of miniatures and dollhouses, a fascination she imparted upon me. When I was three years old, she built me an amazing dollhouse – easily as tall as I was that year, three stories and entirely from scratch – no kits for Grandma Pat! 

That dollhouse became the center of my childhood imaginings. It was home to legions of Barbies throughout the 1980s, and in the 1990s became the setting for a dozen haunted-house games where I would make up “choose your own adventure”-style stories for friends and babysitting kids. It got dingy, a door vanished, the staircase disappeared, but that just added to its mystique. As I grew up and learned about miniature construction, I always had big plans for restoring it, but life and starting my own family got in the way.

Believe it or not, I still have it. It’s in my basement, carefully propped up on blocks so it doesn’t get wet in our occasional floods, and probably home to more than a few spiders by this point. Many times when living in places too small for storage and especially when moving from place to place, I’ve considered donating or getting rid of it – it really is a big dollhouse. And while I never have ascribed to gender norms and would have happily rehabbed it for my son, he never showed any interest.

But I have never been able to let it go. To do so would be more than giving up a part of my childhood – it would feel like giving up Grandma Pat. Only as an adult did I realize the work that must have gone into designing and building that dollhouse from scratch for a three-year-old granddaughter. It was a work of love, and such things can’t be cast away.

Papa Ivan and Grandma Pat had been married at least 40 years by the time he died in 2007, and she’s been on her own ever since. I have not seen her in several years, as it’s been some time since I returned to Merced. We exchanged Christmas cards and emails, and she joined Facebook along with the rest of the family, but like many in her generation, she rarely posted or responded. 

Now she is gone, and I think my mom put it best when she said, “She was simply awesome, a very unique person, a wonderful stepmom, a good friend, and she and my dad shared a beautiful marriage for many decades. How wonderful that she’s dancing in his arms once again! It’s as it should be. Thank you, Lord, for the gift of this delightful human being who was part of my life for 60 years.”

And now I am able to cry, but it is really our loss for which the tears come. 

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Helping books find a home for the cause

As most of you know, I’ve been a Relay for Life team captain for more than 15 years, raising money for the American Cancer Society. For several years, my team has organized a used-book sale at Leclaire Parkfest, a local festival celebrating the history and culture of this little village (which was swallowed up by Edwardsville sometime in the 1930s, I think?) 

It’s not a small undertaking. The books are set aside all year long by the volunteers at the St. Andrew’s Book Sale, which has about 20,000 volumes offered in a quarterly sale. For Parkfest, we have to load all the books into trucks and vans, haul them to the Park, set up at least a dozen tables and set out all the books. Then at the end of the festival, we pack up the remaining books to donate to other nonprofits.

This year books went to the Head Start program at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, to SIUE Phi Kappa Phi to distribute to area Little Free Libraries, and to Metro East Literacy Project. The volunteers came from St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, Phi Kappa Phi and SIUE Sigma Tau Delta, the English honor society foolish enough to elect me as president this year.

We had a fabulous time, and our volunteers were awesome. Want to know how awesome? Some of the books left over last year had been stored in a church member’s barn, and when we were unloading, we discovered that several of them had brought unexpected visitors. To be more specific, we opened a bin and a mouse jumped out onto a volunteer’s arm!

We have since dubbed Olivia “The Disney Princess of Sigma Tau Delta,” as clearly she can charm the wildlife.

The mice apartments, as we started calling them, were taken to a nearby wood and set free by the students. The damaged books had to be thrown away, of course, and I supposed I’m going to have to get used to sacrificing books when I take over running the St. Andrew’s sale next year. But my philosophy has always been, every book should find a good home – and we did that this year, with all but two boxes of books sold or given away to literacy causes that will make good use of them in our ongoing efforts to celebrate the written word.

The gross total for the sale was $946 for the American Cancer Society, which was actually higher than I anticipated while not quite meeting the amount last year. It will be reduced a little by expenses, but not many; now that we have Frodo the Bookmobile, we don’t have to rent U-Hauls anymore for hauling large quantities of books.

A million thanks go to our terrific volunteers, who didn’t just endure the mice and keep hauling books. They stayed, they came back to pack up, they hauled tables back to the church, and three of them even followed us all the way to O’Fallon, Ill. to deliver the last of the books to Metro East Literacy.

Here’s a few pics from Leclaire Parkfest, with my thanks to everyone involved. It’s a great start toward our fundraising for 2023, and I’m happy so many books found a home.

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