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
