The kind of community we have in NoMi

Readers have probably noticed the lack of content on JNS over the past few days – perhaps the longest this blog has gone without a new blog post. John has been busy and last Wednesday my grandmother Edith Kallungi passed away. I have just returned back to town after being with my family for the last several days.

My grandmother was loved by many and will be missed by all who knew her. I’m sure I will be telling stories about her life and how she has been a part of mine for some time to come. At the funeral, the church was quite literally overflowing with friends and family who came to pay their respects and show their support. A bishop from Tanzania was in attendance, and grandma’s family in Finland mourned with us too.

I’ve often said that NoMi, and Hawthorne, are quite similar to the small, rural towns in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where I grew up. People know each other, look out for each other, lend a hand when they can, and a shoulder to cry on when that’s needed too. The flowers above are an example of just that, because they were given by people in the Hawthorne neighborhood when the news was heard about my grandmother. Knowing that people around me here were so supportive even without ever having met my grandmother truly did make her loss easier to bear. So thank you all.

And now, I have two requests. My first is that JNS readers NOT submit one-line comments saying only that they are sorry for my loss or something to that effect. Those will be appreciated greatly but not published, as the point of this post is not to garner more comments of that nature.

My second request is that JNS readers DO share similar stories. When have you been in need and had friends and other community members come to support you? Stories like that are the ones that show the true character of the neighborhood we’re proud to call home. And those stories are what would make an 83-year-old farm wife who lived her life in a town too small to have a post office say that she knows exactly what we mean when we describe our community.