12 days in Paradise

How do you begin to describe an aunt who has been, in turns; a teacher of important things like horse handling, pole bending, dog training, art, weeding, knot tying, camping, and storytelling, a critic of everything you do like scrambling an egg, raising a child, or paddling a raft, a writer of 7 published books, and painter of western art?  My Aunt Jo is now in a nursing facility after a fall last winter. She will not be returning to her home on 6th St.  Jo spent 76 years of her life in Livingston, most of it living in that house.  Since her mother died in 1975 Jo has presided over the collection of items in the house dating back to the Civil War.  The past 20 years she was an avid garage sale attender and gave up on housekeeping.  I'll let your imagination fill in the details.  Needless to say, the house was packed!  In June all seven Sykes cousins descended on Livingston (from as far away as Alaska and Massachusetts) over a period of about 7 days. It was the first time we had all been together in one place at the same time.  We held the mother of all garage sales and redistributed all the stuff Jo had collected over the past 20 years.  It was a gargantuan effort.

These 12 days in Paradise consisted of me continuing to help my cousin Tina sort, research, catalogue, redistribute and organize some of the remaining belongings.  We tackled hundreds of books, looking them up on the internet to determine value, cataloguing the ones we thought were good ones, and contacting a dealer in Bozeman. We donated at least a hundred art frames to the Center for Art and Culture in Livingston, to be used for youngsters and adults taking classes there.  We removed the nasty carpet tack strips from the house and the old, abused wood floors sprang back to life.  Tina showed off her awesome researching skills to determine the history and value of dozens of silver and china pieces. There are still many things to deal with but we made a lot of progress.

Thayer spent his time making some plumbing repairs to the rig, assembling a super duper wifi antennae for our trip, and scanning almost 2000 family photos so that he can return the original photos to his aunt in Arkansas.  

We did find time for some fun, the Yellowstone River was perfect for some tubing, Rylan and Kim were available for visiting with their darling little girls, and we attended a Shakespeare in the Park Henry V performance at historic Chico Hot Springs. Thayer and I also went to the Park County Fair and checked out the pigs, cows, horses and sheep, then watched some of the 4H auctions. It was wonderful to see the proud youngsters showing their animals and projects and getting great prices for all of them. We also spent a few hours enjoying the "Fiddler's Picnic," a great crowd of musicians camping together and playing all types of country and bluegrass music just for fun.

It was the longest time I've spent in Livingston since I was a teenager and I really enjoyed the time.  We carted our bikes into town and ran our errands, looked at houses, ran our tubing shuttles, visited Jo, and just enjoyed the wonderful, flat, little town.