In a home that was built in 1887 on property that reaches three city lots, one family is making plans to save money. When Rick and Rebecca Lieb got married about four years ago, they brought eight children to the relationship; Cody, 20, currently in the U.S. Army; Joshua, 16; Katherine O’Bryan, 15; Nicholas, 13; Conner O’Bryan, 12; Rikki 11; Julia O’Bryan-Lieb, 11; and Zachary, 9. “They call themselves ‘O’Bryan-Leibs,’” Rebecca said of her children. “There is such continuity, they’re full siblings. They really pull together.” A year ago, the family started thinking about making a new addition to the family. Because of the rising price of gas, Rebecca said she has plans on having the family’s pony pull a cart for local travels. The family already uses a “flock of bicycles and a 12-passenger van, “which guzzles the gas.” We typically do think out of the box,” Rebecca said.

“Come spring I will be all over town. … There are animals all over town, and 100 years ago, Carthage was full of carriage horses. We’re not that far away from that time. Nobody thinks that maybe they don’t have to have three cars, a big mortgage … people frequently doesn’t think further than the standard quo. The real charm of Carthage is its pastoral and its historical value. I think it would do us well to embrace that as a community. It’s a different way to look at life and the world.”

There is another contributing factor to the family’s money-saving decision. Julia is still in the diagnosing stages of having autoimmune diseases. She has fevers, severe pain, averages 15 hours of sleep a day and has to make frequent trips to Children’s Mercy in Kansas City.

Jean Fears recently finished the final chapter on a family history project that spanned 54 years. With some sadness, Fears realized it was time to end the monthly newsletter she and her eight siblings kept going all these years. It didn’t matter if they were traveling in distant countries, working long hours or nursing children or spouses through illness, everyone counted on the newsletter arriving in the mail to keep them informed about what was going on in each other’s lives. After her brother died last month, only Fears and an invalid sister in New Mexico remain. By sharing her family’s story, Fears hopes others will see the value in regular correspondence, especially if the family is scattered.

Even ordinary daily events can be meaningful decades later. In one entry, for example, an older brother who lived on a ranch out West told about using a new electric saw for the first time. What an improvement it was over cutting logs with a manual saw, he reported.

The newsletter never would have happened without the initiative and persistence of Fears’ late sister Clara, a stern taskmaster who insisted everyone send their family news to her by the first of the month. She typed it up and had copies made on onionskin paper with an old-fashioned mimeograph machine for years. The carrot at the end of the stick was the prompt arrival of the newsletter each month.