It's a lot of ruckus to host guests, since my usual preferred activities these days are on the quieter contemplative side. My siblings left last week, and more guests arrive next week. I do love having guests, but I've been more nervous about it lately. It's either the pandemic or aging, or both, making me less flexible, or less tolerant of change and chaos. Socializing, it seems, has become like practicing an instrument; something I need to keep working on to get better at it.
Family
The Best Thing
"Tell me the best thing that happened to you this week," I asked Facebook. I asked in 2019, and again in 2021 and 2022, just so I could hear happy news about people thriving, at least in the moment. It's what I needed to hear in one big slurp, in view of everything else, like these times. You know.
Manzanita Beach
Alan's birthday is as good an excuse as any to gather family at the beach. We've been together forty odd years (both meanings, yes). It all worked out somehow, and here we are, with a family we love, in a new state we've learned to love, and a coastline we've loved since childhood. Now I've discovered my new favorite Oregon beach town. Manzanita is the perfect ratio of beach to town - seven broad miles of soft pale sand, flat and firm, and a short few blocks of town.
California Getaway
When I visit California it's with one foot firmly planted in the past. This is how it all used to be, this highway, those hills, that beach, this restaurant, that friend, the place I used to….
Inheritance
I inherited my father's brown eyes, bushy eyebrows, and his curly hair. I have his wheezy cough and I hear it when I'm sick, and wonder how he got into my room, though he is long gone.
Camp NanaPa
This winter we're back in the sleepover groove with the grandkids after a long hiatus. Fun but tiring. I somehow feel youthful and ancient all at once.
Wordless Wednesday
On the road to eastside Oregon, re-learning our social skills.
Risky Behavior
I'm at a restaurant a thousand miles from home, seated closely around a table with ten beloved family-in-law members. We are eating, drinking, chatting, unmasked, and I'm thinking, how the hell did I get here? Alarm bells clang in my head.
Mother-in-Law
Marilyn was a family gal through and through, and she worked at being a good mother-in-law.
Bird Friend
Today the grandkids and I buried one of the baby scrub jays that live in the tall line of arborvitae lining the upper edge of our backyard.
Rivers and Roads PDX 