Old Ladies Need Their Sleep

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.

Tammy and Curtis

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.

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.)

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. 

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.  

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.

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