VOLUME 1, CHRONICLE 20, EDNA & A CAKE PAN: This is your paternal great-great-grandmother. Twenty three years ago today, May 17, 2001, we lost her. Also pictured, her cake pan. The pan is mine now & I treasure it like The Louvre treasures DaVinci’s Mona Lisa. She came into this world on New Years Eve 1911 as Edna Arizona Ashford. On May 26, 1928 she took a vow & changed her last name to the same one you were born with. It was a name & a vow she kept for 72 years & 356 days until Alzheimers finished its tour de force on her mind & soul. She would have been a perfect player for Nick Saban, she showed up every day & trusted the process. Her job, the only job she ever had, was running the house. Two children arrived during the Depression. A look at the 1940 census shows a nuclear family of 4 plus her mother-in-law & two of my granddad’s brothers. She was chief cook, bottle washer & CEO of her nonprofit kitchen. Your Great-granddad told, on numerous occasions, that often there would be someone at the family dinner table that he had never seen before & never saw again. She embraced that “treat your neighbor as yourself” thing. Those individuals, like the cake pan, were dented & beaten, but they would be filled with something good. She was a wonderful grandmother of three lucky individuals. From first through third grade, that pan held many treats when I got off bus 83 outside her house. She was at her garage door, every day, doing her job as a grandmother, waiting for me with a smile & some marvelous homemade confection under the lid of that pan. Every. Day. At Christmas, every year, two $5 bills. I viewed it as a fortune when I was 6 or 7. I viewed it as a cynic as a 16 or 17 year old. It wasn’t until I was going through another heirloom, my grandfather’s Bible, that the significance of her gift came into focus in one of those moments Atticus Finch described as “…crawl into someone else’s skin & walk around in it”. Her church tithing record from 1947 was among the notes & momentos between the covers. Every week, she gave the same amount. Every week, trusting the process. Every week trusting in the words found in Malachi, (paraphrased) “bring the whole tithe into the storehouse & I will pour out so much blessing there will not be room to store it”.  2020 & 2022 were highlighted by each of your arrivals as years get shorter among some long days. In November 2019, I found out an awful truth of adult math, five construction superintendents don’t divide equally into three construction projects. In 2020 I had to embrace my neighbors feelings more than ever, as everyone seemed to have a mad on over everything. And I had to trust Malachi’s process of tithing, the percentage stayed the same as previous years, but the amount smaller, the sacrifice greater. Like your great-great-grandmother, I’ve found the blessings too great to store. One son & his wife greeted each of you, their beautiful daughters. The other son, a debt free college graduate & newly minted husband. Like her cake pan, I’ve been dented & beaten but underneath, trusting the process, still resides something good, good on smooth roads & those with potholes, good from jobs lost to the job I didn’t know I needed, one thing is for sure, if any day is gonna claim a win over us, over the process, it better bring its lunch ’cause it’ll take a while, ‘cause we’ll bring our lunch & we’ll bring dessert too. We’ll bring it in our cake pan…