It’s Sunday night and the house is quiet, finally. That’s kind of an odd thing for me to be saying because the biggest reason for us to be leaving here is that it is too quiet most of the time. Not today though: we had family over for the weekend for a few celebrations. Yesterday my,almost 8 year old, nephew arrived with his granny, my mother. We spent the day together doing 8 year old boy stuff, climbing trees, tromping through the fields in search of wild animals, (we found a spider mole but the dogs found it first, nuff said about that), burping, passing gas, more burping…you know 8 year old boy stuff. We had so much fun together and he loved coming to spend the day with us. We had a conversation about the leaving of this house. He has gone through quite a lot of transition in his short life and was feeling pretty unhappy about the whole idea of Auntie Jan not being at this magnificent home for much longer. I understood and we chatted about his concerns and made plans for our new area. I had a magazine from the area we’re moving to and showed him all the fun stuff 8 year old boys could do up there and that seemed to help a bit.
He’s a great little kid and I’m glad he’s in my life. Today the rest of the party crew arrived, in various stages of time, until there were about 20 of us in total. We were celebrating birthdays, father’s day and mother’s day, belated, and ends of school and bon boyages…..The guitars were out, the djembes and tom toms came out, the harmonica and the violin were at the ready and every body’s voice was well oiled. The food was fabulous, the weather was perfect and the music making was just perfect.
The crowd hardly felt like a crowd in this big home and I know that won’t be the case in my next home but that’s ok, we’ve had Celtic ceilidhs in our kitchen in a home that was 900 square feet, packed wall to wall and still had fun. Today was a grand day, a joining of families, of generations and of cultures and it was absolutely perfect. I don’t wonder about this part of my summer of leaving, I know that I can reconnect with my family wherever I am living and for that, I am most grateful.
