When my mother was in elementary school, instead of taking home economics like other girls, she took shop, like the boys. This taught her carpentry skills still being put to use today. I've long told her that she could have--and still can--become wealthy as an architect, interior decorator, or miniature builder, but instead, she has mainly used this skill for her favorite hobby, designing miniatures (dollhouses that you don't get to play with) for pleasure. She always kept decorating magazines and dollhouse magazines around, amongst others, and was like a kid at Christmas at dollhouse shows, miniature stores, and with others in her miniature clubs.
One photo here reveals just a tiny aspect of my mother's talent and love. It shows one room in my 8 room miniature countryhouse, built upon request when I was a child by my mother. The 1st one she'd built entirely from scratch, was a 23 room miniature mega-mansion the length of a wall in our dining room, that had been built for Lynn.
Each of us had our own rooms, literally, in this mansion though, including a few extended family members--though she chose all the decor and objects that reflected our favorite things. Eventually, she built a brownstone townhouse for my sister Janet which is about 4 feet high, an old fashioned country store for my brother Donny which came actually as another one of my requests, another country home for my grandparents, and a variety of roomboxes, including one for Halloween & one for Christmas. The one time she finally decided to take my advice and start a business with them, after so many had asked her to build one for them, she received two orders immediately, but after designing the first one, she couldn't part with it.
Another photo displayed is from a Newark Museum exhibit--that included one of my mother's miniature roomboxes. The entire museum display was about Kwanzaa, and they requested that she design one reflecting this African-American holiday. If you click to enlarge it, you might find the miniature photos of my niece Amina, my great-grandparents through my maternal grandfather, one of Janet's wedding photos, and even one of my mother's paintings-- of me as a child--in miniature.
There is a also a photo showing my mom and I at this museum exhibit's opening ceremony along with one of my mother's many close 1st cousins, Silvia--of the 52 1st cousins from the lineage of those great grandparents mentioned above alone! Those great grandparents raised their 10 children (and many of their own children followed suit with large families)on their self-sufficient farm, owned a thriving general store that catered to both Blacks and Whites, a nice home with lots of acres of land (which is still there), and all this at a time when most African-Americans downsouth were sharecroppers!
Our lineage has also had countless family reunions in their honor over the last couple of decades and my mother has coordinated, or helped coordinate, most of them. Lynn coordinated one in Atlanta (her home for 18 years), and the next to last one, which was in NC. Our mother has been the closest thing to our family griot at each one, after painstakenly spending years searching archives to trace our family geneology all the way back to my 5th great grandparents--alive during the time of George Washington--and creating the framed family tree charts that you see in the photos behind she and Silvia (which you can again click to enlarge).
My family still owns many acres of land in the area and it tears me up now that much of it is for sale and I cannot afford to buy and preserve it. I have always longed to do many great things with all that land for our whole extended family so it would be a place that remained full of my kinship groups who are proud to call it home. It was bad enough that I grew up hearing how my father and his father sold over 100 acres of land from their part of my lineage. But Lynn and Janet were the only relatives in our generation besides myself that also loved it so much. The others think it's "too countrified" and boring even though the nearest city has been growing by leaps and bounds these last couple of decades from all the people relocating to it's many beach areas.
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