Best Family EVER

Today, I had visits from two nieces and my sister in law.  Family connections are the strongest and the ones from which you receive the greatest healing power.  Family understands your unspoken travails and grants you access to their strength unequivocably.

And what fun we had, remembering the days when we were children, and reminiscing about the foibles of our paternal units; ok mostly MY paternal units.  So many memories were shaped by our childhood that would have had amazingly different slants had these things happened to us as adults. 

Chicken tortilla soup; it's what we supped upon and inspired our musings. It amazed us to recall the hall furnace; that horrifying heat element that laid in wait for you in the middle of the hallway; you HAD to walk on the sides of it or risk being forever imprinted with burns.  Who on earth would design a house like that in this day and age?  My nephew still bears the waffle scar from the day, as a toddler, he fell upon it.  Those puppies made radiators seem like a luxury!

My father, being fifty-two when I was born, was anachronistic; out of time with the reality his children experienced.  And I wasn't the last...next came Jane, and then Wendy, when Daddy was sixty.  Life adapted and moved on, but Daddy didn't and that made things hard for us.  It wasn't until we were adults that we realized just how perfectly wonderful were the gifts our older father had bestowed upon us.

Papa had two rules; you never lied, and you ALWAYS shared.  How powerful those lessons proved to be were only discovered once we became adults and realized that those two rules would ensure utmost happiness.

Of course, the sharing rule could be a tab problematic.  How?  Oh, let's say there was a piece of pie left over from Thanksgiving.  My aunt made amazing pumpkin pies.  But NO ONE would eat that last piece, because it would be selfish... it had to be shared.  So, inevitably, it would be thrown out because none of us would benefit from it unless we could ALL enjoy it.  But the lesson of sharing was one that would last forever; it would inspire community service, inspire charitable giving, inspire compassion and understanding for our fellow man.  My father gave us such an incredible gift.

I'm tired again, and ready for bed, but what a great day it was; sharing it with those I truly love and reconnecting and enforcing the bonds of family... the strongest bonds on earth.