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"I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding generations, as the great anniversary Festival. it ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade... Games, Sports, Guns... and Illuminations from one end of this continent to the other from this time forward forever more." ~ John Quincy Adams
Carolyn and RJ are in town for the summer, and even though we haven't seen them in a while it almost feels like they never left. The best difference since last time? They brought their sweet baby with them.
And it's a good thing little Lewis is the happiest extrovert you ever saw, because he probably won't get a second of peace around here.
Our family loves a good seasonal tradition, and one of the best of springtime is strawberry picking. We started nine years ago during our first ever Real Spring (when you grow up in Florida you only have vague notions that such things actually exist, much less come around every year without fail). Our people were tiny, the picking took hours, they ate more than they collected and whatever they did manage to collect usually got spilled. A few times. By the time we left we usually had just enough strawberries in our bucket to make the anticipated strawberry shortcake for lunch.
Time marches on and I'd forgotten to notice, until this year, really, that while our tradition has strongly remained, the logistics of it have changed. I'm pretty much fresh out of little people these days (because when your oldest is four, that's tiny. But when your baby is four? Not so tiny at all). The picking gets done in record time and we always end up with an abundance of strawberries. Way more than just one lunch worth of strawberry shortcake. But there's still the shortcake, and I'm pretty sure that tradition isn't going anywhere.
My dad and his brother, along with their young wives and one daughter each, both lived in Marrietta, Ga. in the mid-70's. They added me to the mix in September of '77, and then gave me a little friend when my cousin was born five months later. I've heard the stories of those days all of my life and I have no doubt that my fun-loving dad and Uncle, my spunky, adventurous mom and my Aunt, and their two little girls had a blast together during those years. And while my cousin and I, just tiny babies tagging along at the time, don't remember those sweet days ourselves, we still enjoy the bonds that they created within our family more than 35 years later.
After that brief time in Georgia, our families went their separate ways: us to South Carolina and them to New York. We saw each other often on our yearly trips to Florida to visit our Granny and Pappy where legendary family stories were made (skinny dipping toddlers being one of the favorites), and I vividly remember gathering in Atlanta for our great-grandfathers funeral (we called him Old Pappy). We were six and we stayed in a hotel and I rode to the funeral in my Aunt and Uncle's white station wagon and we chewed grape bubble gum on the way.
By the time we were 10 our families had both moved to Florida and we no longer needed to rely on the bond our parents had forged for us. Our summers were spent in Granny and Pappy's pool (with bathing suits!) and our birthdays found us buying gifts in double so that we'd match. Weekends were for sleep-overs and trips to the mall, where we would lunch on a large fry from Boardwalk and, of course, a coke. Our moms would get their Barnie's coffee and we would try on ridiculous outfits in Contempo Casuals and curate our list of must-have's from Beneton. We tap danced, modeled, and acted in our early days, and youth group and babysitting and crushes defined our teen years. We were growing into our own selves, but those selves were shaped around each other.
We went off to our own schools to chase our separate dreams, and found ourselves mirroring each other yet again. We both met "the one" in our freshman year. We got engaged within three weeks of each other. We got married within three weeks of each other. We spent that summer planning our weddings together and sneaking eye rolls at each other when yet another person would tell us we were babies to be getting married. It would take us fifteen years to agree that those people had been right.
By that time, we would have said that we'd grown up together, and as the years go that would be right. But the years after our weddings, the years where marriage was so much harder than we thought it would be and the babies overflowed and money didn't grow on trees and hard circumstances crashed into our lives? These have been the years that have grown us up.
Sometimes you are so accustomed to a certain thing just being a part of your life that you don't think to recognize it for the gift that it is. From long before I can even remember, this cousin has been a constant. Our husbands are friends. Our (ten!) babies are friends. We are friends and our lives are so rich because of it.
