Memorial Day

What can we say to those who have gone before us and kept freedom's fires burning except THANK YOU!

God bless you all!!

Dawn

Summarize 40 years?

Forty years ago this month I graduated with honors from Eureka Public School in Eureka, South Dakota!!!

I think that statement deserves it's own paragraph!  Last night our Senior class President sent over a short summary of his life, over the past 40 years, in honor of our 40th class reunion.  He urged us all to do the same and my first thought was, "Yah right--like anybody would even care!"

HOWEVER, then I read his life's summary and found it very captivating!  That was the encouragement I needed to write a little something about my life over the past 40 years to share with whichever of my classmates would care to take the time to read it.

This is what I wrote and, after going through the effort, I thought that perhaps there may be someone in the blogging world who may be interested enough to read it too, so here it is.

Thanks for checking in on me here! 

Lots of love to all my readers!

Dawn

 

Hi to all of you 76ers, 

I think one cool thing about how my life turned out is that it hasn’t changed all that much in one really important aspect.  I recall helping my dad clean grain in the granary in our back yard from my earliest memories.  After school I would go up in the granary and heap the grain over the shoots so dad could keep the grain cleaning machines running.  Later, I helped my brother clean the grain for dad and his many customers.  Still later, as a young bride, I made a little extra income running the grain cleaning equipment by myself.  Years after that, my husband bought a small grain elevator and cleaned grain out of it.  Still later, he built a portable grain cleaning unit which he has taken to farms for nearly 25 years.  After that, my son built his own unit and has been a portable grain cleaner, like his dad, these past 5 years.   

The grand finale of this tale is that last Summer Robert and I bought the massive grain cleaning facility in Steele, ND where, guess what, we clean grain.  My husband, my 2 sons, and now my son-in-law operate this plant year round providing farmers and grain processors both organic and conventional grain cleaning.  It’s been amazing to watch our niche grow and such a joy to keep our family working together!!!

Personally, I wandered into the world of alternative health care 10 years ago when I was dying from shingles on the brain!  It saved my life and now I provide these services for others!  I love seeing the improvement in people’s health (and relationships) and I hope to be doing this work for another hundred years or so. 

Robert and I chose to home educate our 3 children so that we could assure that they got a Christian education and to teach them the skills that we wanted them to have in the business world.  It was an awesome 22 year “Project” which ended 2 years ago when we graduated our youngest from our little school we had named, “Seeds of Truth!”  I will always remember my speech on that day where I shared the joys and some of the challenges we had experienced as a home schooling family.  I hadn’t planned to say this at the end but I imagine that it came from all of my years in school.  I looked across the crowd of faces; took a deep sigh; and said, “School is out!”  As the tears slid down my cheeks, I finally understood how much I had truly loved school BOTH as the student AND as the teacher!   

Last Fall, Robert and I celebrated our 35th anniversary and we wondered, “Where have all the years gone?”  We’ve farmed/ranched organically and conventionally.  We’ve cleaned millions of bushels of grain.  We’ve milked hundreds of cows and dozens of goats.  We’ve welcomed into our arms and grieved the loss of our children.  We’ve home schooled; home churched; home birthed; and home worked but it was always about our family being together because THAT is what matters to me the most!  To those of you who feel the same, “You’re awesome!” 

God bless you all,

Dawn (Delzer) Bornemann