2023 was quite a year for us, friends. Here’s a sampling of what went down for us in the past 12 months:

February: My husband found that his employee was moonlighting while calling in sick, and fired him. The employee tried to file charges, but then dropped them. Bad feelings all around.

April: My husband had routine surgery, but complications arose and he ended up in the emergency room on Easter Sunday, and in the hospital for the following week.

May: I took a DNA test, basically on a lark, and found that my maternal grandfather (who died long before I was born) was not biologically related to us. This was a shock to my mother, who then had to come to terms with the idea that everyone in the family who was around at the time of her birth must have known this, and kept it from her. To protect her, naturally. But it was hard on her to find out now.

Also in May: The translation company where I worked full-time hit a few snags, and my boss said she couldn’t afford to pay me in full. It’ll just be for a couple of months. Except it went on for much longer, and as far as I know the company never fully recovered. I am living from freelance work again.

June-August: We hired a bookkeeper to help us with my husband’s business taxes. The bookkeeper recommended a tax advisor she’d worked with. The tax advisor took us on, then a month later told us that he was cutting all ties with the bookkeeper, no reason given. This led to emails from the bookkeeper that started out normally, then escalated into bold, underlined and in sizes/colors to emphasize her points. She completed her work for us but then left everything at her front door for us to pick up. We never did fully understand what the problem was.

November: I flew to America to visit family. On my third day there, my mother collapsed and went into the hospital, where she died 10 days later. I am devastated but at the same time grateful that I was there and not on another continent, that I could sit by her bed and talk with her, hold her hand, and simply be there until the end. I will be grieving for a while.

December: Covid-19, just in time for Christmas.

OK, the year wasn’t all bad. The DNA surprise came in tandem with a lot of confirmation about the other branches of my family, so I’ve been digging into records and archives to find out more about my family tree. In doing so, I’ve learned a lot more about Pennsylvania history as well as Pennsylvania Germans – not the Amish, but rather the Lutherans and Reformed congregations that populated Montgomery, Chester and Berks Counties. I’ve learned that we are related to two Pennsylvania governors, the first early Swedish settlers, Revolutionary War and Civil War soldiers, and even triplet babies that were regionally famous for a year (until two of them died). I also began to connect with not-so distant relatives – second cousins, first cousins once removed – whom I knew about but had never had a relationship with.

One generation passes, and the next picks up the torch.