December 2021 – The Parnassus Pen

Here’s a Video That Jonathan Made for Christmas

My husband, Jonathan, made a Christmas video and posted it to our other blog.

Here’s the link: https://www.jennyandjonathangetmarried.com/lifeblog/2021/12/merry-christmas-heres-a-video/

Sunsets and Sunrises

*Mount Saint Peter Roman Catholic Church. New Kensington, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. May 7, 2021. (Photo: Jenny Gaffron Woytek)*

So, a little bit over a week ago, my maternal grandmother died. Grandma Margaret.

Grandma celebrated her 90th birthday this past summer. In fact, she celebrated her birthday during the week between my birthday and my sister’s birthday, and several other family birthdays occurred during this same week. Grandma left behind a lot of people who loved her. However, I understand that all or almost all people who live to the age of 90 lose much. My grandfather died several years ago. And, as Grandma reminded me, she herself had only one sister, named Shirley. Shirley died of cancer in her 20’s. About two years after the first Shirley died, my grandmother had my mom and she named my mom Shirley. My mom, the second Shirley, died of cancer three years ago. Grandma wondered about this to me. She wondered about the odds of losing both of her Shirleys to the same disease, decades apart.

But, I remember something completely different now. After my mom died, I sat and looked through Grandma’s photo albums with her. We looked through an album consisting mostly of photos that Grandma herself took. Grandma took A LOT of photos of sunrises and sunsets. She took some of these photos when she visited my uncle in Florida. She took other sunset photos over the winter countryside after my grandparents retired and moved out to farmland in Beaver County and raised goats. She took them with her point-and-shoot camera. She paid to develop them, then put them into her photo albums along with her photos of her family.

I learned that day that when I enjoy a sunrise or a sunset, I owe this at least in part to Grandma Margaret.

Sunrises are beautiful. Sunsets are sad but also beautiful. Neither exists without the other.

Mural: “Rising Phoenix” at Voodoo Brewery by Shane Pilster

*Fifth Avenue, Downtown New Kensington. December 4, 2021. (Photo: Jenny Gaffron Woytek)*

If you Google “New Kensington” and “Voodoo Brewery,” you can find a lot of photos of Shane Pilster’s “Rising Phoenix” mural. In fact, here are photos that I took last December, a week after Krampus brought me my camera.

You can also find a lot of information about New Kensington’s Voodoo Brewery / Voodoo at the Ritz and Old Town Overhaul with a quick Google search. Here’s such an article from the Trib.

So, for this blog post, I took a bunch of photos that showed the “Rising Phoenix” mural in the background as the community gathered for New Kensington’s Christmas Parade.

I felt really defeated last spring over the setbacks that Jonathan and I had encountered in trying to rebuild our front porch. I wrote a snarky post on this very blog about how murals weren’t going to solve New Kensington’s problems. The murals weren’t solving any of MY problems. My sister Elizabeth is a hero because she read the post right after I published it. She told me that I was harsh. I took the blog post down about an hour after I published it. The post now resides for eternity in blog post hell. Or, maybe it resides in blog post purgatory because with my luck it’s cached somewhere.

But, now our porch is almost complete. I feel much more hopeful about my future here in New Kensington.

These marchers arrived on a bus from Valley High School in New Kensington. I watched the bus arrive. It travelled past me and unloaded on the next block over from where I sat waiting the parade to begin. I saw kids sitting next to the windows, holding their trombones.

I have a soft spot for the high school marching band. I marched in a high school band when I grew up in Somerset County. I played the clarinet.

I don’t remember getting to march past any cool brewery murals, though.