Digging Out

The year of 2013 is nine days old and I have been digging into my winter job list with a passion. I worked on editing the church book full time last week. I didn't actually count the hours but if forty hours is a full work week, then I put in overtime because some of the days were 12-14 hours.

I have a ways to go but am feeling much better about the status of the project so this week I allowed myself a little diversion. I'm still trying to finish up that revised Burkholder genealogy that was supposed to be published in January and got pushed off until April. I need just a few little things yet to wrap it up. Quite a few of the one family are buried in the Terre Hill cemetery and I suspected some of the others were too. I decided today was the day to make the run down there and see if I can dig out what I needed to fill in the blanks.

I stocked up on my cemetery supplies, backed out of the driveway, and stopped with a THUNK. I forgot there is still a pile of snow at the edge, took the corner too close, and got hung up. I marched in to the garage, got a shovel, and dug fifteen minutes to free the car. Not the kind of digging I had in mind!

After returning the shovel to the garage and washing my hands, I took off again, backing out carefully this time. A half mile down the road I realized I had forgotten my purse and I needed it to make a stop at the post office. Back home I went, retrieved the purse, and backed out carefully again. I was beginning to wonder if God was sending me smoke signals to stay home. But I'm too determined to give up easily. If the message was not to say I should stay home, maybe it was to give me practice in not taking the corner too sharp.

The rest of the trip went smoothly. I found the cemetery and almost everyone I was looking for. I harvested the pictures of the stones and came home to fill in the blanks in the genealogy. It turned out one of the people I could not find is not there because he died in Virginia in the Civil War. Now I just have to look for two estate settlements in the Lebanon County courthouse and six death certificates at Harrisburg. Then I think I can close the book on that project, provided no one else pops up that I need to dig out.