By Pat Mulso

When you are reading this I will be in Peoria, Ill., where my brother and sisters and I got together for the weekend to celebrate my youngest sister turning 50, another sister’s 40th wedding anniversary and a chance for everyone to visit with Mother.

We started meeting there back in the late 1980s, as it is the halfway point between here and Dayton, Ohio, where I am from.

We first started meeting one of my siblings there to take my boys back to Ohio to visit their cousins for a couple of weeks in the summer. A few years later we met with all of our families for a long weekend after my stepdad passed away because we decided we should all get together for good times rather than just for funerals.

From there a tradition began, and though our kids are grown we still get together, we play cards, eat, visit and laugh about things we did as kids and mom enjoys the opportunity to have us altogether.

Since our dad has been gone for so many years, I think we all cherish the opportunities we have had to spend time with our mother and enjoy her good sense of humor and her never-ending wit.

She has not had an easy life and yet she never complained and always taught us to make the best of what we had and to see the good in others.

If anyone could stretch a nickel into a dime it would be our mom.

As we were growing up there seemed to be nothing that she couldn’t make if we needed it.

She also taught us to always be willing to learn something new, as you never know when that extra skill might come in handy. She also taught us to never give up on our dreams.

As we were growing up, she always put us (her family &045; Dad, my brother and sisters, her mom and dad and my dad’s mother) first. But she always had a dream that she would one day get her high school diploma.

She had started to pursue that dream when my dad was still alive and then he had another heart attack and again her dream was put on the back burner.

In June of 1996, at the age of 75 years, 7 months, her dream became a reality as she was the oldest graduate to receive her diploma and she had five of the proudest children you can imagine.

They ask her to speak at the graduation; she made the front page of the local paper and the 6:00 news. What an awesome day!

We all have memories we should be sharing and this past month when my husband’s stepfather had a heart attack and was rushed to Rochester in the middle of the night, it brought back many memories for me.

Some are good and some not so good, but what it reminds me of is that we don’t know if we will be here tomorrow or not, so we should not put off till tomorrow what we can do today, tomorrow may be too late.

We want to say a special thank you to the nearly 100 people that came to the museum on Sunday, Feb. 26, for our transportation panel discussion.

It was a delightful afternoon.

We have now switched our attention to the theme for this month, which is business and industry.

We hope you will drop in this month to see the displays on past and present businesses from our community.

If you have any memorabilia on your business that you would like us to add to our collection or just display for the month, please give us a call or stop by and see me at the museum.

We will host an open house on Sunday, March 26, from 1 to 4 p.m. at the museum for business and industry month with a slide presentation at 2 p.m.

Please mark your calendars!

Also remember that if you are interested in attending our library lock-in workshop on March 31 for beginner genealogists be sure to call or stop in for details.

If you have not picked up a copy of &8220;Glimpses of Freeborn County 1930-1980,&8221; copies are available at the museum, Doyle’s Hallmark Store and Bayview/Freeborn Funeral Home.

If there is one bit of information you wish your family knew about someone in your family or if there is someone in your family that you are really proud of, but you haven’t told them, why not do it today!

Pat Mulso is the executive director of the Freeborn County Historical Museum in Albert Lea.