Susan's Folley and The Ogdensburg Branch

Hello from the North Country. In New York you have "the City", "the Lower Tier", "Upstate New York", and "The North Country". The City is obvious. Upstate is all along the throughway from Buffalo to Albany. This is also the path of the Erie Canal. The Lower Tier is the cities just north of Pennsyvania. The North Country is the area above Upstate in that portion of the state that follows the St. Lawrence Seaway from Watertown on Lake Ontaria to Vermont. This is a different world. They do not acknowlege being a part of any of the rest of New York. They are their own country. The North Country.

Our branch is an hour up the seaway from Watertown. Below you see some pictures.

Here is the branch building, a first stage chapel just a couple of years old.

Here is the missionary home. A pair of sister missionaries live here as well as a senior missionary couple. We stay here when we come up for the weekend. You can see the seaway to the left of the picture, left of the red cabin. All the rest of the pictures are taken from this house's backyard.

The following 3 pictures are a panoramic view of the seaway from left to right. Of course on the other side is Preston, Quebec, Canada. The big white building is a granery.

It is good to be going up there and working now. This weekend we went up Saturday night and met with the Sister missionaries. They told us all about the members in the Branch. We went to the services in the morning and had a brunch with them. Afterwards we divided the branch between the Guthries and ourselves and started calling the members in our area. Out of the 10 phone calls we made we were able to visit one. There was another branch couple there and we got to know them for about an hour. We feel like we know most of the people who come out to church. We are now going to work on meeting those who don't. We will drive up there on Saturday mornings and spend the afternoon and Sunday afternoon trying to visit people. If we don't have appointments for Monday morning we will drive back Sunday night.

We had an interesting experience while going to our visit. We passed a cemetary near Ogdensburg and saw a man all bundled up sitting in a folding chair by a newly dug grave. After going about 2 miles past, the spirit said we needed to go talk to him. We drove back, parked near him and walked over. He looked at our name tags and said he was grateful that we cared enough to stop and talked for about 1/2 hour. His wife had died 2 weeks prior and he found this was one place he could come and find "peace". He was familiar with our church but had found his answers in the Catholic faith. We got to know him and were grateful the spirit had sent us.

Now to Susan's folley. It was fall and Susan could not resist the urge to can. We went out and spent $20 for quart jars, $10 for a 5-gallon jug, and $30 to fill it with grape juice at a vineyard down in Naples, NY. It tastes great. It cost $3 dollars a quart for grape juice. Compare that at your grocery store. Next year it will be half that. Below is a picture of the 5-gallon jug and some of the quarts. Don't they look great! The Concord juice was not available so we bought Iona grape juice. Still a very good tasting juice and a beautiful color.