Sunday, July 10, 2011

Family Time

This week’s post is being written in a downstairs playroom surrounded by our children and grandchildren. It’s early. Real early! We are in the first full day of a family reunion at Shaver Lake, northeast of Fresno. Our grandsons are ready to have fun and their mom, aunt, and grandparents are trying to keep them entertained so the rest of the folks have a chance to sleep a little more. We don’t like their chances.

We’re on the road again. We started this adventure at Disneyland where we were treated to a wedding of a former pretty little blond neighbor who spent a lot of time growing up in our backyard. She married her longtime girlfriend in a fairytale wedding of two princesses. This is not the time or place to discuss the politics of same-sex unions or debate what words like “wedding” and “marriage” should mean in California. Instead we would like to wish our beautiful Harmony a world full of joy as she and Heather begin their lives together as a couple bonded in love.

The next day we ended up at the Sequoia National Park and saw a lot of very big and old trees. There was a lot of walking and our necks are sore from looking up at the majestic canopies that look like they could tickle the bottom of the clouds. It’s places like this that remind us of our humanity simply because so much of it isn’t manmade.

Then it was down a mountain, make a u-turn, and back up another mountain. The quiet serenity of the sequoias was replaced with a large house near a mountain lake and the joyful noise made by some of the more exuberant members of our family. There is something magical about twenty people traveling from all over the state to sit down at a loud talkative dinner together. We just hope we can remember some of the stories we heard so we can fit them into one of our novels.

So that’s it for now. Nothing earth shattering but living in a world that, for the moment, feels wonderful and heartening. Hopefully some of this will rub off on your world this week and lift your spirits until they float high enough to tickle the clouds.

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