July 19, 2008

• Time Saver

  I am doing something I have never done before — writing a post to be submitted in the future.  I am doing this because I am going to be MIA for a week or so.  We are heading to our annual “family reunion” week up north (as we say here in Minnesota — which is pretty much “up north” to everyone else in the entire USA).  I just don’t want my old and new friends to think you have been abandoned!

  I have never before called this annual trek a family reunion, but in truth, that is what it is.  My sisters and I gather at the same place, during the same week each summer, with as many of our children as can make it.  Most of the “kids” are grown to adulthood now, I have the only kids that are still truly kids.  All others of the generation we have borne are out of high school.  Some are married, some are even bearing their own children!  Our parents always join us for a few days, but never for the whole week.  We have our rituals.  We always exchange our birthday gifts for the year during this week in the summer, regardless of when our actual birthdays are.  My actual birthday DOES happen to always fall during this week, so I feel extra special.  I get to have a birthday party with my sisters every single year.  We always spend one day just shopping.  If we are lucky, we get to go shopping at “Crazy Days” in the nearest town to the resort where we stay.  It’s a highlight.  It’s the same junk you can find in nearly every tourist town across the country, but we love it because it is our tradition.  I always visit my favorite bookstore, Beagle Books, and ask the friendly and knowledgeable owner for her recommendation – and then I buy it.  We eat our evening meals together every night, each of the sisters taking a turn being the cook for the night.  The men take over for us one night, proving they are still “hunter-gatherers” by supplying a bountiful harvest of sunfish, crappie, northern, and walleye for our main course.  We go out to eat at Rocky’s Pizza on our first night there, because we are all too tired from packing and traveling to worry about cooking.  We go out for breakfast at the West 40 on our last morning together, at the end of a week that always seems too short. We trade books with each other.  We drink coffee in each other’s cabin every morning — whose cabin it is depends on who has the freshest pot.  We talk, and laugh, and sometimes cry.  Occasionally we get on each other’s nerves.  We bask in the summer sun and our sisterhood.

  I am so blessed to have a family that enjoys being together.  I thank God and my parents for the environment of love and harmony that has always existed in our family.  I hope my own boys have the same kind of friendship with each other as they make their way in the world as my siblings and I have always enjoyed. 

  I’ll see you all next week when we get back!  

  

  (The next generation – taken 2 years ago, all but one were able to make it that year)

   

  • 6:48 pm
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