I'm at Dad's for the next several days...still can't get used to saying it this way. When Mom was alive I'd tell people that I was "going to my folk's for the weekend." To me folk's always meant Mom and Dad's, but now that I think about it, a person's folk or kin can be any relative or family members. I can still say I'm going to "my folks'" meaning, "I'm going home to see my people, my family."
So I'm back amongst my folk, and I got a chance to see a lot of them tonight. It was Sauerkraut Days in a town about ten miles from where I grew up, and it's been a longstanding tradition to: meet at my Aunt Irene's house, go watch the parade, and return to her home for beef burgers and a whole lot of other yummy stuff. Tonight, visiting w/ aunts and cousins and siblings and nieces and nephews, I felt the depth of this tradition and w/ it the breadth of Mom's absence. The first hour together was spent reminiscing about, "Which year was it that we had to head to the cellar b/c the tornado sirens went off?" and "Were you here last year when....?" Most family gatherings begin w/ this trip down memory lane before sharing current events in our lives. This is the talk that binds families together. I don't make it back every year for this tradition, but Mom and Dad never missed one. Even last summer when she wasn't feeling well, she was there. It's hard to return to these yearly events when events have brought change during the past year.
I could envision Mom sitting in a lawn chair next to Dad during the parade, commenting on all the tractors and fire trucks and making comments like, "Blah, why do they have to blast their sirens so loud?" As of now I still see her wrapped in a blanket while sitting in that lawn chair, but I hope eventually I'll get to the point when I can recall the healthy, vibrant Mom who loved family traditions more than anyone. She never had much of a family of her own growing up so these events were always so important to her. Dad knows that, and I think that's part of what keeps him going. By returning to these events and traditions, he feels her presence spreading through her potato salad and her rhubarb upside cake and her ability to remember any person's name whenever someone was at a loss while recalling a story.
It's a happy time to come back to my folk, but the loss is more obvious. Being 150 miles away, I can almost pretend that she's still alive. But I'm too old to pretend, and there's no use pretending among folk anyway; they know the truth.
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