A thank you letter

Friday, January 8, 2016

Dear Mama and Papa, January 5, 2016

Mama you remember how you always made me write thank you letters to my aunts who generously gave us gifts each year. Well, I don't write too well these days in spite of all the coaching you gave me in penmanship, and you never heard of an email letter either; but I wanted to write and thank you and Papa for all the years of security, fun, education, travel and love we experienced in our family.

These last two holiday weekends have been filled with reunions of different parts of your very extended family visiting us, making one pleasant visit. It brought back to me all the years we all came home to your house, wherever it was, for the holidays. I never wondered where you would have us all sleep, and I certainly never wondered if there would be enough food.

There was always room and there was always a welcome. I couldn't help asking myself these last weeks: Did you spend hours planning, worrying and shopping beforehand to be ready? Did you heave a sigh of relief when it was all over and we all went home? I'll have to admit even though I wouldn't have missed a moment (well maybe one or two) of these past weeks, it is nice to now be back just to us and the cat plus an icebox full of food. Well, now it is a refrigerator and freezer.

We played games. Some of them are new and some of them individuals played all by themselves without joining the group, but we also played the old ones. I remember you, Papa, in playing "Hide the Thimble" would reach up and put the thimble in the chain that held the ceiling light in the middle of the living room. We made the rule that 3-year-old Avery must be tall enough to at least "spy" the thimble however.

We played "I Am Somebody" and one of your great-great-granddaughters chose you, Papa for her person. Our mixture of relatives included so many extended relations to each of us that we quit asking if it was a relative. It got too complicated.

Thanks to friends from the church and our daughter-in-law in Texas (they couldn't come this year), we had sent in, mailed in and carried in food, but I didn't do much, if any.

You see, I am now older than either of you ever lived to be, and it was all I could do to lead the games. Does that sound familiar? I remember you saying that when it was time to wash the dishes after a big meal, I always went and played with the little children. It wasn't until later when I had little ones of my own that I realized that really was helping also. We experienced that his year with one of your great-great-great-granddaughters playing with your great-great-great-great-granddaughters.

Life goes on, you see your vast family still is always trying to get together to have fun and eat. You instilled that in us, not the eating as much as the getting together. I remember how Aunts Gladys and Lyle left their comfortable homes to travel to jam up in our house with no, or later, one, and still later, two bathrooms in order to be with us all together. They didn't want to be left out.

When one sibling brought his/her family to visit you that was a signal for the rest of us to try to come also, at least to overlap a bit. Didn't that ever wear you out?

I do remember Papa getting a little perturbed when Ellen's children and ours were taking turns sliding down the stairs at The Wayside on their rears. Of course his office was directly under the stairs, so that counts for that.

I never was or will be the parent, grandparent or great-grandparent that you were but I do have the privilege of having one more generation to love, laugh at, worry about and hope to see more often than you did, but I am very grateful I had your example to follow.