Reunion Weekend

My bed here is the most comfortable I've ever slept in, but every so often I can't help it--I want the floor.

I want the floor like when I was little, when my cousins, all eighteen of them, were babies and it was cots in the living room and blow up mattresses on the bedroom floors.   When my Grammy, when even my Pop was still alive.  Breakfast would go for hours, the uncles all were still full of testosterone enough that the basketball court was theirs and bets would start the night before.  The bathtub when it was dark out and time to come in would be full of water the color of dirt, and I would go to sleep sunburned with tired legs but still happy because when the house is full of family and bedtimes on the floor even sleep turns in to more time to play.  This house, now my father's house, was our family house, my grandparent's house, the beach flophouse for dad and all six of his brothers and sisters and every one of their kids.  It's family reunion weekend, today's family reunion day, and that's how it used to be.

Today was beautiful, soft, easy-going.  There was food on the grill most the day, a nice breeze, relaxed horseshoes under the shade of tall pine trees.  Lots of sweet relaxing in low-sat beach chairs.   It was the first reunion that didn't have lots of little kids. Just two little ones of my second cousin Bern, from Newport News, her grandmother was my great aunt Frida--my pop's sister.  Pop and Aunt Frida are both gone, so are the rest of their nine brothers and sisters.  Besides Bernadette's kids it was just my cousin Joey's son. Joe was born in Africa to my dad's sister, and raised in Germany, and just moved here to Ocean Pines with his wife and fifteen month child.  The first, for our clan, of the next generation.

And so life goes on.    We have additional bedrooms in this house now, but even so my two aunts and their husbands and the kids live a street from here and my uncle and his wife and kids live over on the other side of town.  I sat at the head of the table next to dad last night when we kicked it all off with steamed crabs and corn on the backporch here.  It was a mellow night, the aunts and uncles early to turn in.  Dad's the oldest of his generation, I'm the oldest of the next.  I looked out over it last night a long while with a swift awareness: time is passing, it is a joy, it is bittersweet.  I wish the house was still uproarious, loud and full of laughing squealing little kids.  And I am grateful too that I am adult, with so darn much love to show, and a place no matter who's around that will always be home.