Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
I really do have a lot to be thankful for this year despite the fact that it was a year of tremendous loss. I pulled out the guest book from our upstairs room that we call “The Boyd Suite”, just to reminisce about all the wonderful people that have visited us in the, going on to, 4 years that we have lived here. We’ve had a few more friends stop to visit that didn’t spend the night so we don’t have their thoughts in this journal. It’s been a whirlwind, the last several months, and we are so blessed to have had visitation from so many to keep us too busy to stop and grieve over our loss. I suppose that is something we can be thankful for.
This journal goes back to our first overnight visitor Sydney, our granddaughter that moved to Scotland. This entry was posted on August 4th, 2021. Sydney had decided to move to Scotland permanently and since then has finished her education, found a job, fell in love, and got married. We had only been in this house just over 5 months. A short 2 months later our good friends, Richard and Debbie spent a few days with us on their way to visit Debbie’s dad in Arkansas. Richard was a letter carrier in Winters California, a small town that didn’t provide him with as much overtime as he wanted. He transferred to Winters from my town of Dixon just before I became the postmaster there. He called me and introduced himself. He told me he could carry any route in Dixon and he was right. I used him several times and he made it to my list of top ten best carriers I ever worked with. Carlene later transferred to the Winters Post Office as well and became great friends with his wife Debbie. Later, my daughter Jillian also stayed at the Boyd Suite while she was between houses before moving to Gypsy.
February of 2022 brought Natalie to our humble abode (She called it the Stalnaker Castle). Natalie is the daughter of a good Studebaker friend from California named Jason. She was about 10 or 11 when I first met her. She had graduated high school and decided she wanted to take some time traveling across our great nation before heading off to college. Jason called me and asked if we could host her for a couple of days and we were honored to do that for him. That was the day I broke my wrist shoveling ice. Certainly not Natalie’s fault, it was another life lesson for me to listen to the wise advice of my wife who knew I was about to do something stupid.
April of 22, we hosted Anthony for the first of 3 visits. Anthony suggested that instead of The Boyd Suite, I should call it Anthony’s Room. I made up a sign by the time he came back and he loved that. The next month we were blessed with a visit from Roger and Charlene Haugen on their way to visit their children who had moved from California to Tennessee. More friends from our church in Dixon. That would be the last time we saw Charlene as she passed away suddenly this year. I did say at the beginning of this story that it has been a year of tremendous loss. The blessing is the memory of them stopping along the way to visit us. Carlene was very close to Charlene in more ways than just the similarity of their names. That loss was shocking to us.
Amy and Shawn stayed for a while when they were hunting for their own piece of Oklahoma. Daughter Jillian stayed again, daughter Jessica, and Anthony two more times rounded out 2022. Sydney came back to visit in 2023 and it looks like that was the only visitor that year, or the only visitor that spent the night. She spent Thanksgiving last year here. Hopefully she will bring her husband Paul next time.
Daughter Jessica and husband Trevor made it in time to visit her grandmother and that was covered in a story in early September. We were visited by our friends from Iowa in mid-October and Carlene’s cousin from Kansas after that and then the grandchildren, and then my son Jon and his wife Alyssa. Most of this paragraph is covered in the last few stories I have written.
All these visits have been therapeutic for me as I have been too busy to ponder and grieve our loss of Carlene’s mom. I can’t speak for her, but I think it has been good for Carlene too. I still think I hear her walking down the hallway from time to time. She had a great life and we were blessed to be able to spend the last 23 of those years with her. Listening to her talk about wanting to be with her husband makes me feel warm inside. I cry not for her, but for those of us that will miss her presence and character. This week will be more of the same, Thanksgiving on Thursday with Jillian and Tim and a bonus extra day with them on Friday since that is Jill’s birthday.
For Thanksgiving this year, I have to give thanks for all of our friends and family that have been there to share love and time with us. Happy Thanksgiving…
