This morning I?m at my mom?s. My sister and her boys are here, two of the three, as the third is home working and with his dad and his family who are visiting from Canada. My sister-in-law and nephew and his French Canadian Grandmama are here. My brother is home sick. My children are away for the weekend with their dad and stepmom and a group of friends. My mom is here, fully in her home, hosting us all. Her friend is here, helping her set up furniture and label coolers and thermoses of drinks. Soon my aunts and uncles and a bunch of cousins from several generations will arrive. We?ll have Beef on Wick sandwiches, a local favorite, a salad I made of produce we collected yesterday at the Farmer?s Market in town where the parents of the best friends of both my sister and me happened to be, and from a farm stand outside of town run by one of our high school classmates, baked ziti made by my sister while I made the salad, a cake for my mom?s cousin from Texas who will be 80 this winter, and lots of food the relatives will bring. This is how my family gets together. My mom lives in the house where we grew up. The bedrooms where we sleep when we come home are the ones we slept in as kids. The furniture is mostly the same, though now there are more beds to accommodate the partners and grandkids. The house and yard are pristine. I did not inherit, nor learn that from my family. In that way I am a black sheep, and also keep trying to reform.
Last night after a dinner of grilled meat and many local vegetables, my sister and I went for a long walk down the road past the neighborhood where we lived as small kids. We talked and walked until nearly dark. When we got home, we sat at the table and ate ice cream with peaches and blueberries. My two year old nephew sat on my mom?s lap eating a gigantic cookie and told us a tall tale about driving his ATV up the steep and bumpy road, where he had driven the coon up a tree and scared off a bear. I told him about the cows escaped from their pasture in Ashfield, about the moose and bears who tore apart the farmer?s fences and bothered the hogs and loosed the cows, who meandered down the road to poop in our yard and drink from our pond. I?m not sure he was impressed. He went on to tell us more Adirondack tales. We wondered which other parts of his dad he might take on, besides the love of ATVs, coons, dogs, the outdoors, and radical adventure. He managed to finish the very large cookie he took instead of peaches and ice cream, then climbed off the lap of Grandmama Pearce (his name for my mom, spoken in his French Canadian way) to play with his dad?s old toys, while some of us stayed up a little late watching diving on the Olympics and others of us drifted off to bed.
My sister has just gone to her van to get the charger for her iphone. The door slams and makes the sound it has always made, one of those aluminum insulated doors hung tightly in its? frame, to keep out cold air and snow, and I remember all the times that door blew open and the cold came in, and think perhaps that is why we always slam it shut. Without the slam it might blow open, something might come in or go out uninvited or unnoticed until too late.
I am a person attached to place. I wonder at people who move and move and move. Growing up I agonized when we left the home where we had lived from my early childhood until age eleven to move to this one. It took me years to call this place ?home. In my adult life, I can only barely imagine selling the house I?ve lived in for nearly twenty years, even as I struggle to maintain it. I love knowing the sound of the door to my brother?s bedroom banging in the breeze. Even as it irritates me, it has irritated me that way before. This house breathes that way. It has cross ventilation. The hallways are wide, and as I walk down the one on the second floor from the staircase to my old bedroom, I imagine that if we could cut that hallway in half and lay the two sections side by side, they would make a room as big as my kids? bedrooms in Somerville, the hall here is that big, our house in Somerville is that tight, not a lot of hallway or entrance space, no finished basement or office or family room or two car garage or storage barn with loft, no acre of grass, six acres of field, or nearly twenty of woods to explore..all these are luxuries of my growing up I have foregone as an adult in favor of living in a crowded, expensive city far away. Some of this we?ve got in our place in the country which we share with friends, the yard, the acreage, the woods, but mostly, our life is very different from the one I left behind here nearly thirty years ago, when I went to college at seventeen, as my boy is soon to do, coming back to the state where I grew up to start his adult life.
Time to help again with the party. I wonder what stories I?ll here for the first time, which repeats, what family connections we?ll all feel, folks from Western Canada to Texas to Massachusetts to New York gathered in my mom?s back yard for a meal and conversation, games if we choose, maybe a walk for some. It?s good to be home. We can never have everyone here. Even when I was a kid I knew some were not with us when we?d get together. Midlife, it seems there are as many missing as there are here. Somehow that?s ok today. I don?t feel sad, just thoughtful.
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