cousins – Tess Perko's Blog

The Purpose of My Blog

I recently took a free class about blogs from Reedsy, a website that offers professional help to writers.

One of the topics discussed in the online class was the purpose of a blog. While I was reading about this, I realized that I had begun my blog for the purpose of improving my teaching skills; however, now that I’m retired, my focus is on my own writing and my other retirement activities.

The purpose of this post is to explore the current focus of my blog.

Practicing Writing Skills

The biggest focus of my current blog posts is to practice various writing skills.

I am currently exploring the ideas for my second novel so I decided to writing a series of character studies. In each post, a new character finds herself in a different situation. I use distinct character traits to identify her. I choose a unique name and reveal whether she is a child, youth, young adult, or older. I sometimes describe her physical characteristics, especially if they are important to the story. For example, if she is riding a bicycle, I may describe the strength of her legs.

Since each story is unique, I use specific description to illustration the setting. She may be in a bedroom, on a trail in the country or behind the bar in a night club. In addition to using visual description, I try to add smells and noises to make the setting as vivid as possible. Perhaps, someone has spilled whiskey on the bar or the juke box is blasting out Beatles’ music.

Sharing My Writing Experiences

Since I retired almost three years ago, I have written one novel and over one-hundred blog posts. I also have petitioned several publishers about the publication of my first novel.

Needless to say, I’ve learned a lot in the past three years about my current writing activities. I like to share my experiences so that other writers can benefit from my practice, and so that I can interact with other people who love to write. Writers have so much passion about their work, and that excites me.

When I was writing my first novel, I wrote a post about my experience. You see, I didn’t have much of a clue how this project would go. Maybe I’d write it and find out it was awful. Maybe I’d have to completely rewrite it.

I wrote about telling people about my novel writing. They asked detailed questions. I made no promises. I protected my heart from criticism, but I listened to it as well.

What happened? I actually wrote a novel that is now being considered by a few publishers.

In another post, I wrote about how I evaluated publishers for my first novel. I thought this was important to share with other writers since publishers all have their own missions. Writers waste time if they don’t evaluate which publisher is appropriate for their book.

Sharing My Retirement Experiences

Retirement has turned out well for me because, during the first month, I made a three-part plan of what I wanted to do. The first goal was to write a novel. Second, I wanted to become fluent in a second language, and, third, I wanted to raise money for scholarships for community college and vocational students.

I’ve met so many people in the last three years and I’ve learned that some retired people are happily retired and others are bored. I write blog posts about my retirement experiences to demonstrate how retirement can be a vivacious time of life.

I’ve traveled several times since my retirement, and I’ve written about these trips. Two summers ago, I visited my cousin’s dairy farm in Minnesota. I wrote a blog post about being a “town girl on a dairy farm.” From that same trip, I wrote about how my ancestors came from Kashubia, currently a northern part of Poland. I also wrote about a hike on my great-grandfather’s property, which is now a Minnesota State Park. And I pleased my dozens of cousins when I wrote about how diverse they were.

I joined a philanthropy group named The Alamo Women’s Club since they raise money for college and vocational scholarships. Now, I’m the chair of the AWC Scholarship Committee. I’ve written a blog post about how we awarded eleven scholarships to financially-disadvantaged students in April, 2023. But that’s not all the organization does. We collect coats in the winter for people who need clothing. We assemble food packets for Ukraine refugees in Poland. We sponsor jewelry sales for scholarships. Our activities have provided a host of ideas for my writing blog posts.

Now that I’ve written this post, I’m going to revise my front page to update the purpose of my blog. It’s nice to gain clarity.

Cousin Love

No one ever talks about their cousins, except my family. I have 44 first cousins that live all over the United States and beyond. I have friended many of them on Facebook. Many receive Christmas cards from me, and I visited many in Wisconsin and Minnesota this last year. I feel as close to my cousins as I do my own siblings.

My parents assured us that we would enjoy being from a large family since we’d always have friends. They were right. Even though I don’t see my cousins on a daily basis, they bring me so much joy and satisfaction.

My cousin Tim lives in Montana. He recently retired as the Superintendent of a tiny school district. Since I was a college professor, our careers were focused on helping students and improving education. We also comforted each other when we went through our divorces by sitting in a car in San Diego in the middle of the night and sharing stories after his brother’s wedding.

My cousin Roslyn is a high-school history teacher in Michigan. We both believe that students are better off when they learn history from more than one perspective and understand the difference between equity and equality since we worked with those concepts in the classroom. Roslyn is my philosophical partner in our extended family.

Carolyn lives in Winona, Minnesota. She raised her son as a happy single parent and now has two grandchildren. Yesterday, she posted a picture of her front yard packed with snow where she had painted flowers on the three-foot snow walls beside the path to her front door. What a creative spirit!

Cousin Dan lives in Japan with his wife and two pretty daughters. He works for the United States Navy and leaves his family for months at a time while stationed on the U.S.S. Reagan. I love his mustache and fun-loving family, who spend their afternoons searching for pottery on the beaches and artistic manhole covers in the towns.

My cousin Arlie is a handsome devil who has worn his once-dark-but-now-gray curly hair both long and short over the years. Once he drove a truck full of Wisconsin cheese to my parent’s house in California. We ate cheddar for weeks. Now, Arlie rides horses with his wife and works at an auto store. Even though we have little in common, at every reunion, we share heart-felt cousin hugs.

Patty lives in Boston and is married to Steve, who completely adores her. They go to baseball games and concerts on date nights, and inspire the rest of us not to give up on love. Patty sure knows how to pick a good partner.

Diane lives with her husband Matt in Minnesota. Now this is a fun girl. If you want to kayak in the Winona Lake, she’ll do it. She knows all the best restaurants in town and will even accompany you to the local spice and Polish museums for an afternoon. If you’re up for it after dinner, she’ll go with you to a bar for a beer and sit outside with the mosquitoes. One year, I watched on Facebook as she and Matt took their motorcycle on a cross-country trip through Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana. Wow, what a woman!

Scott, a happy tall guy with a strong build, owns a dairy farm in Minnesota where he produces thousands of gallons of milk per day for American milk-drinking consumers. If you ask, he’ll take you on a tour of the farm and you’ll see where the calves are raised, cows are milked by machine, statistics are collected for each animal, and cow manure is recycled. Even a town-girl like me learns something every time I visit his farm.

I could go on talking about Lisa in Florida, Marilyn in Ohio, Marjorie in Minnesota, Randy in Minnesota, Karen in Wisconsin, Dewey, Joanne, Debbie, Denise, Renee, Kathy, Scott, Jim, and more, more, more, but you get the idea. I have interesting cousins in my life, and I interact with them frequently enough to maintain vibrant relationships.

Thank you, Mom and Dad, for maintaining such close family ties over the years. My cousins are an essential part of my happiness. I love them.

Cousins in Every Direction

Way back in the 1860’s, my great-great-grandfather Ignatius immigrated to Wisconsin with his four brothers. They all had families. My great-grandfather Leon had seven siblings. Most of them had families. My grandfather Leon had six siblings; all of them, except for his brother Phillip who became a priest, had families. His brother Ed had fourteen children. His brother George had nine offspring. Many farmers had large families so they could use their children to provide free labor on the family farm.

My father had four siblings, and they had children. My father had ten children. His brother David had ten children. And between his siblings Gerald, Mary and Daniel, there were eleven more descendants. Now those descendants have children and so do their offspring.

Then, there is the maternal side of my family. Two families dominate this line of my heritage: the Konkels and the Jereczeks, families who immigrated to the Pine Creek area of Wisconsin in the 1800’s as well. I’m still working out the threads of my great-great-grandparents, but I’m clear about the progeny of my Great-grandpa John Jereczek and his wife Pelagia Konkel. They had eight farm laborers—excuse me, eight children. One of them was my grandfather August. He married Florence Gibbons, a woman from a large Irish family that immigrated to the area during the Irish Potato Famine. Everyone in every generation had large families.

Truly a cousin conundrum. I have first cousins, second cousins, thirds, fourths, cousins-removed in a lot of different ways, over-the-hill-cousins, and near-and-far cousins. Between the farming community of Altura, Minnesota—throughout Winona—and into the farming communities of Dodge and Pine Creek, Wisconsin, I am in danger of running into one of my cousins at any time in any place—as the owner of a dairy farm, at church, in a restaurant, at a grocery store, or on a hike in the state park which used to belong to my great-grand-father Leon. If you count the relatives who live outside of this area—in Minneapolis, Florida, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Colorado, Montana, Idaho, and California, my cousin count is exponential.

What really is a cousin? I did a little research and found a definition. The website Who Are You Made Of? defines a cousin as “anyone who shares a common ancestor with you and is not a direct descendant of you or your siblings, a direct ancestor, or a sibling of a direct ancestor.” This definition certainly proves that I have hundreds of cousins, most of whom I probably will never know since I can’t even keep the names of my great aunts and uncles straight.

I recently visited the Wisconsin/Minnesota area where my ancestors first landed in America, and I had such a fabulous time with my relatives—mostly cousins—that I became inspired to better understand this voluminous family of mine. I do understand who my first cousins are. They are the children of my aunts and uncles. I have 44 first cousins—the children of my father’s and mother’s siblings. When I visited a few days ago, I was able to see about 25 of them. What a fun group they are—laughing, joking, telling stories, recalling memories, and thinking of the next fun social opportunity.

My children’s names are Alex and Rachael. Since I have nine brothers and sisters who have produced a total of eighteen children amongst them, my children have eighteen first cousins just from my side of the family, two from their dad’s side.

The thing is, my first cousins now have children, like I do. With a little more research, I found out that my cousins’ children are my first cousins-once removed. They are also the second cousins of my children. This means that all of the children of my 44 first cousins—I can’t even begin to tabulate this number—are Alex and Rachael’s second cousins.

One day on my visit, I went to the Bronk Nursery which is owned by the son of my Great-uncle Ed—one of Ed’s fourteen children–Donald. Later that night, Donald had a beer with me and some of my first cousins at Wellington’s Pub and Grill in Winona. We sat outside while the sun set, and when the darkness descended, the mosquitoes started to feed on us with a relentless enthusiasm. Since Donald is my father’s first cousin, I believe he is my first-cousin-once-removed.

My brother Ron and sister Margaret were on this visit with me. On Sunday, they went to church in Lewiston, Minnesota to meet Greg, the son of our Great-uncle George. Since Greg is my father’s first cousin, Greg is also our first-cousin-once-removed. Oh boy.

Another time when I visited Winona, I went to a restaurant with some of my first cousins, and the waitress turned out to be the daughter of my Great-aunt Agnes, who preferred to be called Florence. The waitress’s name was Paula Doerr. She was also my father’s first cousin, which also made her my first-cousin-once-removed.

This visit, I was looking for a restaurant for another dinner and I found a bar owned by the Gibbons family. This name shows up in my mother’s heritage line. I don’t know whether these bar owners are first-cousins-once-removed or even worse. After visiting several cemeteries where I was related to an incredible number of inhabitants, I was becoming overwhelmed by all the relationship possibilities.

Think about all the tombstones connected to me. In the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Pine Creek, there are 27 Jereczeks and at least 7 Bronk headstones. There are dozens of Konkels, Gibbons and Broms, too, and they are all related to me. My Great-grandfather Leon and more Bronks and Broms are buried in St. Mary’s Cemetery which turned out to be only half a mile from my hotel. My Grandfather Leon and Grandmother Lillian are buried in Fremont Cemetery–a pastoral place in the country with their son Daniel who died when he was only 29. I even have a great-great-great grandmother who is buried under Mankato Avenue in Winona, Minnesota. When they laid out the streets for the City of Winona, they never moved her body. Her husband is likely buried nearby since we don’t know where he is.

I didn’t meet any of my second, third, or fourth cousins that I know of, but I know they’re walking around the Minnesota and Wisconsin dells somewhere. My research revealed that I share DNA with all of these cousins, and that anyone beyond a third cousin is considered a distant cousin.

I’m married, but if I was single, I could marry my third cousin. Queen Elizabeth II married Price Phillip who was her third cousin, both descendants of Queen Victoria.

It’s comforting to know that I come from such an ample family. I am close to many of my first cousins, and even if I don’t see them on a day-to-day basis, when we do see each other, we take up just where we left off the last time we spoke. We support each other through both happy and sad family occasions: weddings, births, graduations, and deaths. My life would feel so much lonelier without them. Luckily, cousin love doesn’t have any DNA restrictions.