Letter to the Editor

Reader Shares Fall Family Projects 

As we all embrace the extra togetherness at home during the pandemic, longtime reader Tim Heagy recalls some of his best memories of family projects a half century ago. Maybe they’ll inspire the people at your house to try one out.  

“I’m a 57-year-old bachelor that never had any children but I (was) one once. Even though it’s been a few (hundred) months since then, there’s quite a few school projects that my sister and I had been assigned that turned out to be beautiful memories because they turned out to be “family projects” that I’ll remember forever.  

     One of them was to (find) various types of Indigenous wild flowers along with their leaves. Research them, and write perhaps a one paragraph description about them. The collected plants were pressed between pages of books and dried for a while. We fastened them to heavier type paper, attached the description (I believe on a 3 X 5 card) and used plastic wrap to make a page for a book.  

     Another was the same type of project but for local trees. Green leaves were collected and later in the fall, the same but with their color variations.  

     Back then, a computer was only something talked about in a movie at a theater so we went to the township library, signed out the books that we needed and sat down “TOGETHER”. A lot of (this) wasn’t even required reading (but) had me wandering through additional information that I still remember to this day. However, by far the Best memory I’ll Ever retain is our time spent as a family building these assignments as a Family!” 

–Tim Heagy, Churchton