Weekly update: an exhibit, OMG, RSC, reading

 Thank you all for your supportive comments regarding my husband.  The care home assessment was Friday.  His condition is beyond what assisted living/memory care can accommodate.  For now we are increasing in-home care (two caregivers have been recruited to help with the 6 p.m.-bedtime shift (V comes in the morning)).  We have a video visit with his doctor on Tuesday.  

I was able to take time Saturday morning to see this exhibit at the Dunn Museum (part of the forest preserve district).

The oldest quilt was made in Pennsylvania in 1850 (large picture on left).  It came to Lake County after WWII when the maker's great-grandson moved to Waukegan.  

These are county fair ribbons from 1899 to 1904.

The dress on the left was a wedding dress from 1883.  The turquoise dress on the upper right is Thai silk, donated by a friend of mine who served in the Peace Corps in Thailand from 2000-2002.

I had time for a short forest preserve walk before going home.  It was nice to stretch my legs.

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I completed two of my OMG projects and most of the third.   Upper right:  SAHRR flimsy complete.  Lower right:  Transport top-along flimsy complete.  Left:  Mosaic Sparkler blocks are assembled but need borders.

The RSC yellow Ohio Stars are quilted and bound. 

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"A trilogy" is one of the prompts for The Page Turner 2025 FB group.   I chose Conrad Richter's Awakening Land.

I have known about these books for decades but only now have I read them. (I'd have loved them when I was in high school.) As I read I thought about my ancestors who were contemporaneous with Richter's characters. I appreciate more what their lives were like.

The Trees begins in the late 1780's when the U.S. government encouraged settlement in the Northwest Territory (Ohio to Wisconsin). Worth Luckett takes his family from Pennsylvania to the dense woods of eastern Ohio. Oldest daughter Sayward, who is the fulcrum of all three novels, raises her siblings after their mother's death, manages the household, and creates the farm. She marries another settler, lawyer Portius Wheeler.

The Fields takes place in the 19th century (Portius attends the Ohio statehood ceremony in 1803). He becomes a judge; she manages the Luckett land; they have many children. The settlement becomes thriving town called Americus.

The Town spans the 1830's to the Civil War. The Wheelers are the prominent family in town. One son becomes governor; another graduates from Annapolis; the youngest becomes a firebrand abolitionist journalist. One daughter marries the town doctor; another daughter marries an English lord; another becomes an academic.

As Richter writes in the acknowledgement, he wanted to tell the story of "those whose names never figured in the history book but whose influence on their own times and country was incalculable." He continues, "If this novel has had any other pruose than to tell some of their story, it has been to try to impart to the reader the felling of having lived for a while in those earlier days....and the broader stuff of reality that was the lot of the great majority of men and whomen who...lived through comparable events and emotions, for life is endlessly resourceful and inexhaustible. It is only the author who is limited and mortal."

Linking up with  Design Wall Monday,  Oh Scrap!,  Sew and Tell OMG at Stories from the Sewing Room