Not So Black Friday

My family doesn't participate in the Black Friday madness; we used to do it back when we were all a bit younger and a bit more foolish, but now the morning after Thanksgiving is meant snuggled in bed asleep until mid-morning.  But today, we did embark on another holiday tradition: heading down to historic St. Charles, MO to wander about the shops, and see the general Christmas festivities: Santa's of the world, 19th century-style carolers, and lots and lots of pine boughs and ribbons.  We usually don't go to St. Charles until later in December, but perhaps because I won't be back home until Christmas day, we decided to push the tradition up a few weeks, to the very beginning of the Christmas season.

Check out some pictures from the day!

Some of the buildings on Historic Main Street in St. Charles, MO

Mom peeking around some pine boughs

Carolers!  A different bunch followed us around for most of the day

Dad and Hannah :)

Me and Mom :)

Chillin' with some Nutcrackers

Parents being precious :)

After a fun afternoon of window shopping and Christmas merriment, my sister and I attempted to make mini gingerbread houses.  The construction left something to be desired...

Fail.

...but my final result turned out all right :)

The evening concluded with a rousing game of that 1996 classic board game, "Electronic Mall Madness" (emphasis on the "electronic") with my mom and my sister.  My parents have been cleaning out the basement, and this game was found to be still intact and properly working.  It was a fun flashback.  For the record, Hannah won.

Got my shopping list, got my debit card, got my money.

Check out that awesome game board.

All in all, it was a very, very good day of good old fashioned family fun :)  Much better than camping out in front of Walmart.

Last Day at the Grandparents'

Just a quick note to acknowledge that it's the last day of our visit to the family homesteads of West Virginia.  We set off on our return trip in the morning, and will arrive back in good ol' St. Louis on Saturday afternoon.  All in all, it's been a good trip, and as usual I will probably be sad to say goodbye.

Some quick tidbits about today's happenings: we spent the morning with my mom's family doing the country thing again, then traveled with my paternal grandmother out to Pennsylvania to pick up some old family documents (specifically, a Bible from 1854 and a 19th century photo album) from a woman who contacted my aunt via a geneology website in answer to a posting looking for documents pertaining to the Wiesner family (my great-grandmother's maiden name).  Both items are super cool, and I would post photos of them but I'm using my grandmother's computer and therefore don't have access to my photos.  I'm planning to write a post where I wax poetically about the glories of family and heritage and whatnot, so they'll show up here in the near future, I'm sure.  After obtaining the Bible and album, we drove out to Funkstown, MD where my late grandfather grew up, and saw his childhood home and the tavern that my great-grandmother ran.  The day wrapped up with a family trip to Olive Garden.

And now, I'm off to read some of The Great Gatsby (my current read-for-fun book) and get some sleep before the long car ride tomorrow...even though I will undoubtedly spend a great deal of that car ride sleeping anyway.  But I could definitely use some sleep after this busy week!

The Theatre, The Theatre....

Note: The title of this post must be read in a hoity-toity British voice.


You may now proceed.

Today I participated in the quasi-traditional Girls' Day theatre/dinner combination with my grandmother, aunt, mother, and sister.  We've gone to several plays together over the years.  My mom attended college at a music conservatory not too far from my parents' hometown, and we would often travel there during our visits to see a musical or two.  Today, we actually went to a different place: the Wayside Theatre, in a little Virginia town whose name I have since forgotten.  The theatre was charming and unpretentious, housed in a space that felt intimate yet professional.  Our seats were in the very front row, center: up close and personal.

The play that we were seeing was The Nerd, by Larry Shue.  Quick plot synopsis: The main character (Willum) is a Vietnam veteran whose life was saved by an anonymous fellow soldier (Rick).  The two have been in correspondence for years, but have never met: until Rick shows up on Willum's doorstep one night in acceptance of Willum's open invitation to come and stay with him whenever he had need of it.  But, Rick's outlandish social mannerisms (or lack of social mannerisms, however you'd like to think of it) throws Willum's life (and dinner party) into complete chaos.  It's really quite the clever play, and it got more and more ridiculous by the second.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, and encourage you to go see it if ever you have the chance. You'll laugh your head off.  You may also never eat deviled eggs again.

Yum.

Part two of the day was dinner at the nearby Golden Corral, where I stuffed myself silly on an assortment of buffet fare (it really didn't look like that much food on my plate), and ate some absolutely wonderful bread pudding.  Say what you will about chain homestyle buffet restaurants, but the bread pudding is awesome.

As might be expected, I spent my post-buffet evening curled up in my grandfather's old green recliner and watching Modern Family on TV (the one where Cam gets sick and Mitchell is all conflicted about what to do with their Lady Gaga tickets).  Only one more full day left at the grandparents...

Going Country

I am a child of the suburbs through and through.  All my life I've lived in cookie-cutter housing developments, with big backyards and sidewalks and neighborhood pools and all that jazz.  This is, of course, excepting my sejours in cities like Paris and Dallas, when I lived in urban apartments, and my college years in Lexington, which was all historically charming with streets lined with 19th century homes.

Yeah, I'm pretty much your typical city-dweller/suburbanite.  But let me tell you this: I love me a good visit to the country.

My mom grew up as a true country kid, in a house built in the 1930s on land bordered by a creek, forests, and cow pastures.  So now, when Hannah (my equally suburban sister) and I go back to West Virginia with our parents to visit the relatives, we spend a great amount of time living as country folk.  At least, we do when we visit my mom's family.  My dad, like his children, grew up in a cookie-cutter neighborhood.

So this morning around 10:00, we piled into the van and drove out of town to my Mom's childhood home.  It's not more than a 15 minute ride (it's a small town), but it's a noticeable difference from my paternal grandmother's neighborhood...nothing suburban about it.

We pulled our mini van up the familiar gravel driveway, being careful as usual not to run over any wayward cats, and climbing out, we walked up the stone steps and across the grass to the circle of lawn chairs that are always assembled in my grandparents' backyard.  The chairs are set up on a brick patio that my grandfather put in years ago, which is now buckled from persistent tree roots, but which is just as welcoming as ever.  And armed with sweet tea and lemonade, there we stayed, for a good two or three hours, sitting in the shade and talking.  Throughout the morning and early afternoon, we left this lawn chair circle only to chase down an enormous turtle ambling through the lawn at a distance, to eat a lunch of sandwiches, Utz chips, and peanut butter pie, or to spend a moment standing by the window air conditioning unit at the foot of the stairs inside the house.

The afternoon was a bit more active.  As my grandmother, mother, and sister all settled in to watch All My Children and my aunt returned to her home next door to prepare dinner, my dad and I went for a walk around the property.  My grandparents own almost 20 acres of land, laid out in a rather strange format that is oblong and runs behind neighboring houses.  My dad and I first walked down to the creek bed, then around through the gardens and the "Enchanted Forest" where a former Christmas Tree lot has grown up into full pines, leaving a stretch of trees in nearly perfect alignment watching over a bed of pine needles that coats the ground.  We then walked behind the old trailers and up the newly added nature trail, which stretches like a grassy ribbon up the tree-covered ridge at the back of the property and weaves back down to the pond where my cousin Randy tried to teach me to catch frogs when we were little and past the beekeeping yard where my grandfather and my cousin Terry harvest fresh, delectable honey by the bucket load.  Then it was back to the circle of lawn chairs, for more sweet tea and more conversation.

Dinner was a tasty affair of KFC-provided chicken, garden-provided green beans, potatoes, and tomatoes, Cesar salad, and potato bread rolls, followed by peach cobbler (a late celebration of my Dad's 50th birthday in May), and a reappearance of the peanut butter pie from lunch and the carrot cake from the family picnic.  After dinner there was a puppet show (a birthday tradition), and then Hannah and I split off from the family to walk around a bit, and ended up taking my grandfather's tractors out for a spin around the property.  That's right, this suburbanite/city dweller hopped on a John Deere tractor and set off across the grass.  I can be country when I want to be.

The evening wrapped up with a visit to my grandfather's "museum" shed, where he has all sorts of things on display - things collected at auctions over the years, things picked up by a metal detector on nearby battlefields (before that sort of collecting was frowned upon), things garnered from my grandfather's work at the White House.  It's really, really, cool.  I personally like this "museum" because, unlike those silly professional museums, I get to touch everything.  I get to hold bayonets and guns from the Civil War and feel their weight, plop down in a chair that used to live in the White House, and dig through badges and spurs and bullets that are also from the Civil War and hold a Navy pilot helmet from World War II.  It's really a history buff's paradise in there.  Unfortunately, the time came to leave before we got through everything...but I plan to look through it some more over the next couple of days.

By the time we left, as the sun was setting in pink and orange hues over the fields and trees, I was worn out, stuffed with food, holding two bottles of my grandfather's honey, and my feet were covered in dirt.  And I was happy.  Really, truly happy.

A Family Picnic of Reunion Proportions

The internet issue of yester-night has been solved...it turns out that my grandmother doesn't actually have wireless internet - which explains why we had so much trouble connecting to it.  Anyway, I've located the broadband cord, so we're good to go (until my battery gives out.  I managed to leave the laptop charger at home).

The events of today included all the quintessential trappings of a visit to the extended family.  In the morning, my father and I attended church with my grandmother.  My mom and sister went to church with my mother's family, but I preferred to go to Calvary UMC 1) for the nostalgia quotient, and 2) because the building is just gorgeous. It was built in the 1800s, and has one of those old-fashioned tin ceilings and stained glass windows and red carpet and all those good, classic church-type things.  It's the church where my dad grew up, where my parents were married, where I was baptized, and where my grandfather's funeral was held.  I always like to go back there when we come up for a visit, because it's just about as familiar to me as my grandparents' houses.

The service was your typical United Methodist church service, so I won't go into great detail about it (go find a liturgy book if you're super curious).  The highlight of the service, for me, was actually the children's time.  The speaker came to the front, and the pastor invited the children to come forward, and it quickly became apparent to everyone in the room that there were no children present.  The speaker muttered "oh, come on..." good natured-ly, but it was still something of an awkward moment...until, from all corners of the room, the seven teenage members of the church youth group popped up out of their pews and came down to the front, along with the pastor himself, while the congregation laughed appreciatively.  It was a small gesture, but it spoke of the solidarity of the youth with the church, and the lack of arrogance among them.  None of those seven teenagers thought they were "too good" to sit in front of the church and listen to the speaker read from The Cat in the Hat - they saw a gap, and they filled it.  I thought that was pretty awesome.

So that was the morning.  Lunch included grilled cheese and tomato soup, which has an uncanny way of vibrantly reminding me of my childhood.  Also, my grandma makes better grilled cheese than any other grilled cheese maker that I've come across.  It must be a grandma trick.

BUT, the highlight of the day was undoubtedly the Great Family Picnic of 2011.

My parents both grew up here in this small West Virginia town, and so all of my grandparents live here.  We usually stay with my father's mom, but my mom's family lives right across town so we bop back and forth throughout the week.  The catch is that unlike my paternal relatives, who have scattered across the country, my mom's entire family still lives in this area - meaning that every time we Missouri relatives show up, it's family picnic time.  Four generations-worth of family, mind you.

I'll admit, it was rather a daunting site walking up the hill to my aunt's house to the large group of people who had assembled.  In total, the number grew to 30 (I counted), and included grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, cousins' children, friends, and neighbors.  It was truly quite a lot of people to just "come over to dinner," as it were.  But, my aunt lives right next door to my grandparents' house out in the country, so there is a lot of space to be had, and she has the gift of hospitality, so it was a very warm and inviting atmosphere.

And there was GOOD FOOD.  We're talking hot dogs, barbecue, my MawMaw's macaroni and cheese (which is amazing),  cole slaw, deviled eggs, watermelon, corn casserole - all your classic picnic fare.  Dessert-wise, there were fudge brownies, carrot cake, and potato candy...all of which I ate more of than was probably a good idea.  This is potato candy, if you don't know what I'm talking about...I'd never heard of it until today, but it is certainly something I will be attempting to create in the future, you can believe that.

I ate dinner with my sister, my grandmother (who we grandchildren all call MawMaw), my cousin Randy, and his son Logan.  Logan doesn't have fantastic language skills, being a toddler, but he is still quite the talkative kid.  Still, he didn't have much to contribute to the Bachelorette discussions (yes, my grandmother is a fan).  Logan and the other kids (six in total, all under the age of 9) spent the majority of the picnic playing in a kiddie pool and splashing each other with water (and soaking diapers wet through, which resulted in the occasional naked child while parents performed an on-the-spot diaper change).  These picnics are a lot more fun now that kids are around - it used to be that my sister and I were the youngest of the family, and we were always rather shy and reserved and therefore non-entertaining.  The evening wrapped up with a group game of Guesstures, in which three of the kids (Jacob, Chasity, and Serenity) participated the most enthusiastically.  We finally said our goodbyes stuffed and tired, and happy to have seen one entire side of the family in one fell swoop.

In fact, being around those kids tonight made me wish that we didn't live so far away that we only get to see them once a year or so.  But better sometimes than never, right?  I also snagged MawMaw's macaroni and cheese recipe, which makes the entire evening an even greater success.

Here are a couple pictures from the family festivities... :)

My mom's family - my grandparents, aunts, and uncles (and mom, of course)

Cousins photo-op (plus one kid)

Serenity and I

Hannah and Jacob

The neighbor's cat kept coming over and trying to get in the house.  It was adorable.

Family Ties

Lately I've become more curious about my family's history.  I think it's something about growing up and entering the "adult world," so to speak...I'm kind of beginning to see my extended family members as people with an entire life history, instead of just MY grandparents, aunt, uncle, etc.

The seeds of this fascination started earlier this year, when my Dad forwarded me a picture that my aunt had found of my grandmother at my age.  In this picture, the family became aware of my striking resemblance to my grandmother - the same curly hair, the same smile, the same nose.  I even have a touch of my grandmother's redness of hair that appears in selectivity in the summer months.  It's kind of remarkable.  If you're friends with me on Facebook you will have seen the picture, since it was my profile picture for most of the last few months.  If not, here it is, juxtaposed with my senior AOII composite photo (making my grandmother 19 and myself 21 in these images):

I'm ashamed to say that, before coming across this picture, I never really thought much about my grandmother as a young adult.  Of course, there had been snippets of family stories here and there, but since my sister and I grew up in Missouri and the extended family mostly remained in my parents' hometown in West Virginia, I wasn't necessarily raised on the family stories.  At least, not my grandparents'.  I could tell you all kinds of things about my parents' high school years.  But that's another story.

Anyway, over the last couple of months my interest in my family history has grown.  Call it the proverbial quest of a young woman to get in touch with her roots, because at its essence that's what it is.  Little by little, without any effort on my part, pieces of my grandparents' past have been slipping into my life...in addition to the portrait of my grandmother I already mentioned, a photo (posted to Facebook by an aunt) of my maternal grandparents standing on a porch in their own young adulthood, smiling at each other, completely unaware of their life as I know it...

Or a letter that my great-grandfather sent to my grandfather while he was serving in World War II that, like many letters to soldiers during that time, never reached its recipient...a letter collected by some WWII buff who recently passed away, and which his daughter, upon going through his things, took the initiative to connect with my family, placing the letter in my grandmother's hands, three years after my grandfather's death and sixty-nine years after it was written...a letter which, decades after its time, reveals a hidden undercurrent of love and pride in a father-son relationship that was generally unspoken of because of its rocky and unfriendly nature...

And, an even more direct way to connect with my family: a published memoir, written by my great aunt, Nina Holland), who after enduring the death of a child and of her husband, left the United States at age 57 to become a missionary to the Philippines.  The book, called "Children, The Creek Runs On," has sat on some shelf or other around my house for the last seven years, and since I'm likely serving as an intern in a Filipino church next year, I asked my mom to search it out for me, and yesterday read through several passages of it.  It's a unique experience to read in published print the life story of a family member.  I only met Nina one time, and I was about 3 years old and probably more interested in getting this unfamiliar woman out of my house than anything else.  But as I flipped idly through the pages, story after story grabbed my attention as I read of this tall, 57-year-old American woman, my grandfather's sister, who left behind everything she knew and traveled halfway around the world because she believed God wanted her to.  That journey would lead her into face-to-face encounters with multiple cobras, but would also allow her to help other people in vital ways, both physically and spiritually.

My Aunt Nina wrote these words in the preface to her book - "If there is anything noteworthy or anything exceptional in my life, it is because of God’s hand that has led me and sustained me through the years."  Even so, in reflecting on her life, she wrote these words, that I found extremely comforting and encouraging as I face my own struggles in a world away from the familiar (albeit closer than the Philippines): "I know what is between the lines of these letters that I wrote home.  Only I can know the times of homesickness, uncertainties, and discouragements.  But, it is also only I who knows of the great experiences, the joys, and the quiet peace of being where I felt God wanted me to be."  To read of such faith in the face of hardship was quite likely the best thing that I could choose to read at this point in my life, where homesickness, loneliness, uncertainty, and doubt threaten to consume me on a daily basis.  To read of such faith in the words of a family member, and to be so inspired by them, was a privilege.

Still, there is much more to be learned about my family.  Take, for example, this conversation which ensued between my mother and myself today:

Me - So I read Aunt Nina's book last night.
Mom - The whole thing?
Me - No, I just skimmed most of it, and read the sections about the Philippines.
Mom - How'd you like it?
Me - (babble about how the book was enjoyable)
Mom - I'm glad.  That's cool how you're going to work with Filipinos next year too.  I think I'll write to Aunt Nina about you.
Me - AUNT NINA'S ALIVE?????


Yes, all that time that I was reading and being inspired by those words, I thought that I was reading the words of a great-aunt who had passed away.  Not so.  Aunt Nina is apparently still alive and well, living in the hills of West Virginia where she grew up before her Filipino adventures and to which she eventually returned.

Like I said...still a lot to learn about the family :)