Meet My New Family

Running around all week to pick up the Brimfield load in Bay City from Rick Klass (ever helpful, generous and strong as heck), getting it unloaded, the long process of introducing the new adoptions to the existing foster family of someone else's cast-offs and finding for each of them, another who would bring out the best in them. That I'm bringing all these very different things together and making them work together feels very much like making a family where there wasn't one before. It's an ungodly amount of work to rearrange it all, and during a heat wave, with the lousy air-conditioning, and still I'm saying to my intern Erika (a saint to help me) that this is my favorite part of the job!? I realize as I write this that it's the natural calling for this middle child. I want to bring people and things together, watch new connections being made, have a ball. And, selfishly, surrounding myself with people and things feels like love to me. It's also a bit of self-styled therapy, a natural response to the much more challenging effort of maintaining connectedness with my colorful and strong-willed blood-bound family. I know you know what I mean. I think it's not unusual for one's calling to be somewhat born of a desire as yet unfulfilled from this most primal of experiences. So why are we being subjected to her personal issues when all we wanted to know was what's new at The Heritage Co.2? Look it's 5am people, I had a few things on my mind, it's a labor of love and I simply cannot separate me from it or vice versa. Permit this hard-driving, middle-aged woman a bit of ego; for all the bumps in the road, it looks pretty damn cool in there. It surely looks like no other and it means a lot to me that you stop by from time to time and let me share it with you.