I just got home from a two-week vacation immersed in family.
Good, warm, loving, God-fearing, decent people, all of them. And all of them spread
across the state of Connecticut.
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| Tammy and Curtis |
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| Cyndi and Bill |
Cyndi and Bill were planning to drive up and invited me to
hitch a ride with them. They didn’t have to ask me twice! We arrived in
Manchester, CT, east of Hartford, on a Thursday night. My daughter Tammy and
her husband Curtis were waiting for us with open arms. The beds they provided
were welcome after a fourteen-hour drive. We made ourselves at home there for
the next few days. It seems, however, that we left the warm weather of the
south behind; the days at Tammy’s were bitter cold and windy. There was even
talk of snow right there in mid-May! Thank heavens we didn’t see any.
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| Tammy and Cyndi with cousins Bob and Nancy |
Sunday we attended a wedding of my kids’ second cousin. The
ceremony was outside in the cold and wind but, thankfully, the reception was inside
where we thawed out and enjoyed getting reacquainted with family members we
hadn’t seen in a while. It was topped off a few days later with a lunch with my
sister-in-law (we married brothers many years ago.)
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| Mike, Monterey, Kari |
Not to bore you with our family home movies, but let me say we
spent a good day in Seymour, CT with my son Mike, my grandson Monterey, and
Mike’s fiancee, Kari.
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| Cyndi, Mike, Tammy |
Then we went to my sister’s house in Fairfield,
CT where we stayed for the rest of the time. Mike and Monterey and Tammy came
down on a Friday for dinner and a lot of clowning around.
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| Donna and Linda, the old ladies |
One really funny thing happened during our week in
Fairfield. I’m 75 and my sister Donna is 77 and more and more when we look in
the mirror, we see our mother looking back at us. That would be okay, except
occasionally this last week I would slip up and call Donna “Mom.” And as if
that wasn’t bad enough, she did the same thing to me. She’d ask Cyndi to “Go
ask Mom what she wants to eat.”
Sometimes we didn’t catch ourselves until one of us erupted in
laughter.
She and I spent a relaxing afternoon one day having a
manicure/pedicure, then lunch outdoors (it had warmed up by then) at Panera’s.
The person giving us a pedicure asked if we were twins. At least she didn’t ask
if I was Donna’s mother! I went to church Sunday with Donna and Joe at a small New England country church--white steeple, trees all around. Wouldn’t you know, I fell asleep. With only twelve people in
attendance, I couldn’t very well hide behind someone! It’ll be a while before I
live that one down.
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| This bridge is 17.6 miles long and includes two tunnels under the water |
We took two days to come back home in order to take the
coastal route and go over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge which also takes you
through the tunnel that goes under Chesapeake Bay. Now that’s an experience!
You try very hard not to think of what would happen if a crack should appear in
the tunnel wall.
We’re home now with happy memories of quality time spent
with family including Curtis serenading us on the guitar, a trip into the country for ice cream, thrift shop shopping, and birthday celebrations with Curtis and
Monterey.
And that is why I’m now on the East Coast!
I guess it’s time to get back to writing.
Quote of the day: The
little world of childhood with its familiar surroundings is a model of the
greater world. The more intensively the family has stamped its character upon
the child, the more it will tend to feel and see its earlier miniature world
again in the bigger world of adult life. Carl Gustav Jung
