Thanksgiving Day

Another Thanksgiving Day and still COVID-19 is with us. Possibly next year we will be less encumbered by COVID-19. The world has changed a great deal both for me personally and in general. The independence I never gained as a soon to be adult back in the mid 1960s is slowly being taken on by me. I did have independent moments throughout the 54.5 years that I was married to Edward. He did travel for work when we first moved to Ottawa right up until our youngest was about two years of age. After that we used to go to Conferences with him that he attended on behalf of NRC. It was a fun family time actually as we toured the places, my daughters and I, while Edward attended the Conferences. We saw a lot of things in far away places but always on the North American continent. But I was on my own with two children driving about in foreign cities visiting various historic sites. At that time Edward did not know his family tree far enough back to let him know that often enough we walked in the footsteps of his ancestors in some of the places that we visited. Although not into genealogy until long after the girls were grown, I knew that none of my ancestors had trekked in any of these areas. My father was born in England and came with his parents as a child in 1913. My mother's Canadian line is so very small with just her great grandmother, her father and herself born in Canada. Her mother was born in England and emigrated to Canada on her own in 1908. But it was interesting to see the American Historic Sites. Up until that time the girls had really only seen Canadian Historic Sites and visited with some new found relatives in Pennsylvania and New York that Edward had discovered. 

But independence itself was something I never achieved as a young adult except for occasional times when Edward was away and I needed to manage everything. But I did work for quite a bit of our marriage; working before our first daughter was born and then taking on contract copy-editing and proofreading a couple of years before our second daughter was born and continuing with that until I went back to work outside the home at the Medical School first and then The Ottawa Hospital as it came to be known (I did work at the three campuses - General, Civic and Riverside). But still I was not actually independent as I have become somewhat now. It is an interesting place to be; born of necessity of course; I would wish for Edward to be continuing in life enjoying his pension although traveling which he loved to do remains difficult to manage and was anyway because of his medical issues.

 It is interesting though and I am grabbing hold of that with both hands in as much as I am able!