Family season

Quote of the day

A happy family is but an earlier heaven - George Bernard Shaw

No doubt about it. It is family time. And I cannot wait for it to begin. 

It starts next week because my son is coming for Thanksgiving. Our little band of four (life partner, my son, Ada and me) will gather around our table and give thanks for the meal we will all (except Ada) prepare together. I am sure we will give thanks, because life partner knows how to cook a turkey and all the trappings. Son and me? We will help out by chopping and cutting, dicing and slicing, washing dishes, and doing as life partner bids us. Gilad will play the piano - I cannot wait to hear the home filled with his music. I will cry softly because some of his compositions touch deep in my soul. Sometimes, I will sing along, when he plays show tunes for fun, timeless old songs, and especially with old Israeli songs we left behind so many years ago. Tom will bring out his guitar too, and I will find it difficult to sing, because inevitably I choke up with happy emotion when we all get together to make music. We have our standards: Innocent Times, and Across the Great Divide - to name just two. Gilad and I will take long walks by the Wissahickon and talk about our lives, childhoods, life angst, and we will laugh and laugh, even as I cry sometimes to hear how my life choices hurt his early childhood experiences. And he will forgive me gently, kindly, as he always does.

For Christmas, life partner and I fly out to Seattle to spend time with all the Jacobson clan. Oh me oh my, I cannot wait for that either! There will be very good food because everyone knows how to cook really well. And I imagine there will be salmon - from the North West - the best kind! Nelle, Dick, JJ, Missy, Randy, Jared, Mikhaila, Madeleine, Milya ... wow! Gifts will be different this year, because we are planning on pooling our funds to buying some kind of live stock for a poor family in Africa. But, perhaps, we will sneak in one or two small, personal presents for each other. Christmas trees and gentle lights. Huddling in the cold evenings with arms around each other as we go to Unitarian services or take in a Christmas play somewhere. We will smell the sea, watch the otters and seals, and wonder at bald eagles flying across Puget Sound. Love abounds when I am with any member of life partner's family. They are my dear, dear family, listening and accepting, validating and encouraging, celebrating in each other's happiness and accomplishments with full heart.

Yes indeed, there is much to look forward to, be hopeful and thankful for this year. We will all raise our glasses and give thanks for the new political era, that we all worked so hard to make happen. Our intimate family units can now feel part of the larger humankind community. Exclusion and divisiveness is not part of the tone-from-the-top any longer. Political affects the personal, personal affects the political. We are all in this together.

A year ago at Mining Nuggets: Me and my drum

Comments

[Kay Dennison]

Wow!!!!! What a great holiday you will have!!!!