Our house overflowed with family and I looked around and felt so happy. 19 of us gathered on the deck and ate homemade chicken tortilla soup, salsas and guacamole. Two decadent birthday cakes and righteous chocolate chip zucchini bread were still ahead. 19 of us. All squared away on what I have decided must be an enormous deck.
The cousins ran wild all over the yard. They tossed and tussled and threw balls and jumped rope and made each other laugh.
The women danced a prep in the kitchen, with only small missteps as I often had to think pretty hard to remember where certain items had found their new home.
The men talked, and drank drinks from the cooler, refereed the kids, got wrangled into helping with odds and ends, and roamed in and out doing quality control on the dips.
Until all 19 of us ended up on the deck, with twilight approaching and a sunset starting to paint the sky spectacular.
I wore a huge grin on my face and my heart was full.
We have come home, I thought to myself. We gather to celebrate my mom's birthday, a big decade one, and we come to laugh and remember and cherish and hug and talk and make the memories that fill this house with love and make it a home.
It's a bittersweet moment, how time marches on and not everyone I want to make these memories with can be here, but it's still a moment worth cherishing.
Our caterpillar of a collection of home repair projects is emerging as a butterfly of a cozy home, and I loved, loved loved having my family around for one of its first big flights.
Our lives are fleeting and beautiful and terrible and extraordinary, and celebrating my mom's journey today was a joy and an honor and causes me to pause and say to myself, "Remember this. Soak it in and enjoy each moment. You will never come this way, exactly like this again."
It has been a great day Along this Beautiful Path.
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