A small family gathering

I went to visit my aunt the other day. Not an easy thing to do, she lives most of the year in Farmingdale in New York. But she spends a few months in south Florida each year and I got a call from her last weekend. She'll be headed back north at the end of April. But even though she is in south Florida, she's not close by. She's about a 2 ¹/₂ hour ride on 2 lane highways away from here. It's a trip I haven't made in a long time. Years. Several years.

Dee-dee (as we call her) lost her husband (my mother's half-brother) 3 years ago from cancer. Ronnie was the love of her life. And she still grieves. But she's starting to come out of it, even started dating a little. At 75, she looks like a woman in her 60's. Still trim, active, and beautiful.

I think she called because she's thinking about not coming down again. It's a problem for her. Ronnie and she had a small trailer that sits in a mobile home park down near Boynton Beach. Ronnie did most of the work opening it up for the winter visit and they would come down in October, go back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's and then come back down again in mid-January and stay until the end of April. She still has the trailer, of course, but she's thinking of selling it and staying year round in New York. She has 4 children and they all have families (large ones) and she misses them when she's down here.

I had a lot of uncles and aunts, three sets on Dad's side, 6 on  Mom's. I saw more of those on my mother's side than Dad's. Dad wasn't close to his brothers and sister's but Mom was close to hers. And we went to her mother's place quite often for family gatherings plus the usual Holidays of Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving.

All of those memories rush back when you talk to a relative you haven't seen in several years.

And we talked. For hours. Through a lunch, through the afternoon, until Faye and I had to get started back on our trek across the state.
We talked about family, about life, about loss, about taxes (yeah, weird...) and just about everything.


And then it was the long drive in the dark across the state again; listening to the oldies MP3 CD I have in my car. 250 songs from the 50's and early 60's. 43 songs later, we pulled into the garage.


Another journey back in time was over.