Muffled cries of distress, coming from approximately the area of my abdomen, awoke me this morning. Babies, apparently, have nightmares just the same as the rest of us. I wonder at the content of my granddaughter’s dream, which seemed to involve trying to get something out of her mouth. When I could not comfort her, I woke my daughter, who was still sound asleep on the other side of the bed. Within a few minutes, both were sleeping once again.
Sitting in the quiet dining room at my sister’s house in Massillon, Ohio, I am listening to a family beginning to stir. My sister has just come downstairs, but it’s likely our respective offspring and grand-offspring will sleep at least another half-hour. It’s been a week of too-late-nights and sleeping-later-than-usual for them. My brother-in-law was off to work before the baby woke me, and my sister has the summer off from her job with the local school district.
I’ve had my coffee, and checked my email and Pinterest for anything new and interesting. Through facebook, I contacted our second cousin who lives in Brazil, to get an address to send a wedding invitation. No rush, and no RSVP required: it’s an invitation our parents received to the 1964 wedding of our Brazillian cousin’s parents. As Debbie and I were going through some boxes long-stashed from our parents’ house and things from our grandparents’ as well, she found the invitation. It wasn’t immediately obvious what we were looking at, since it was in….Portugese, I think. But then I saw the name “Lazarchic” (my maiden name) in the midst of the unknown words, so I studied it a bit more until I realized it was from when the “other Robert Lazarchic” — by which I mean the one who isn’t our dad, but his same-first-named cousin — married a lady from Brazil. I’ve gotten Sandra’s address in Brazil and will be sending it off to her after I get back.
My son, daughter, granddaughter and I are heading home to Gettysburg (or thereabouts) today, so I won’t write everything I wanted to – perhaps later in the week. Much gathering of belongings and how-is-this-all-going-back-in-the-car to do before we leave, and then there will be the requisite stop at Heggy’s Nut Shop on the way out of town. Their soda fountain is vintage – the original one there since the fifties, I believe, and they jerk sodas and make any flavor phosphate you want, and serve weekday lunches of coneys and butter fries, but we’re only going for the nuts this time. I dare not return home without a good-sized load of hard white peanuts and jumbo cashews. Luckily, they keep pretty well in the freezer, because you can’t get peanuts quite like them anywhere else.
Time to make the donuts wake the kiddos.
Funny how we each have rituals about going home after visiting family. I would load up on Big Red, Zingers and White Castle. We would stop in Ohio before crossing over to PA for a Steak N Shake milkshake. All of these were part of our ritual for leaving IN and heading back to PA. Now my children talk about Ritas, as the summer just doesn’t feel the same without a Rita’s Ice.
Lovely, evocative post about going home again, kinda, or at least being with the ones who’ve known you the longest.