Changes and Endings

Changes and endings follow us through age. Marriage, divorce, children, grandchildren, death, and disease all work to stir our emotions. First love to loss, anger and hurt can lead us on different paths. Friendship and love guides through tough times and the wondrous moments.

Seeing the Grand Canyon was amazing. Stepping from the subway to see Rome finally was a dream I didn't know I had. The adoration for my grandchildren and their amazement in life leaves me breathless. Their selfless love for me has created new life and meaning. Friends of old reach out and new ones appear for support in aging. Everyday, flowers and the wind and butterflies soothe my heart in the goodness of the world. I speak with God daily knowing that he loves me and accepts me as I am. Younger life of wildness and hurt slip away as does time. Summer moons light the night in mystery without fear. And the sunlight moves me to feel life in this place I live.

For 14 years, I planned and led our Howard family reunion in Eastern Kentucky. The reunion began as a way to see family other than at funerals. In those early years, many family members attended. We renewed acquaintance with cousins from a childhood visiting my grandmother Maudie. She was the person who led us in love and to God. We were each her favorite. Grandmother was our connection between a family of six siblings and children. She also shared stories about her parents, grandparents and ancestors long gone. They live in our memory

We met new cousins and distant. Mother’s cousin Joe gave the best hugs and called me baby doll. He is always in my heart. His Sutton family attended for several years and we talked of the old folks. As the years went by new babies joined our family. We also lost family. That changed the dynamic of the reunion. Children were unable to visit because the loss was too hard to bear. Carl and Ruby Marshall were neighbors we knew after Maudie married Callie Joseph and lived at Burning Fork. They are both gone but their son Rick still comes to see us. We have lost mothers and husbands and some to Alzheimer's and ages of 92. Attendees catch us up on their children and jobs and the remember whens. Over the last few years, I have become friends with Hazel Shepherd and her family. They live at Grandmothers homeplace at the Head of Licking in Magoffin County. She has lived there now longer than Grandmother did. Gary and I visit the Howard Cemetery there and then stop to see her. Hazel knew my family and is a distant cousin. She remembers when my baby sister Sandra died and the burial service in the front yard for my grandfather Callie in 1958 preached by brother in law Henry Mullins. When her children go to Walmart, they take her along and she sits in her walker by the checkout and visits with friends or others who talk with her. Hazel gives a lot of good advice taken from a rough life in the mountains. What a great life Hazel has now with devoted bossy children and pet chickens and ponies and a view of the wooded mountains from her childhood and mine. Her daughter Sadie brings her to the reunion along with special candy she makes and fresh green beans and tomatoes which she grows in a garden on her other place. Most of the produce is given to residents on the road home.

Two years ago, Angie said she would take the reunion over. The preparation became too much for me to handle. She has help from Tamara and Ruth as I did. I couldn't handle the stress of getting people to play bingo and gather for the family photos. Some people come to just sit. Others readily join in the auction to raise funds for the hall rental and cemetery upkeep. Sister Leah always brings a quilt for a raffle creating great excitement and money. The winner now wears it parading for all to see. Tamara prints the family tree chart listing Grandmothers descendants. She gets the info from me and of course I always have a wrong date for someone. I take several books I have created with descendant and ancestor photos. It is fun to see old photos and to decide who you might resemble.

As the years have passed, fewer people attend. Reasons are health, age, distance and the infamous family vacation or the I don't feel like going. It is one day of the year!  When I was young, our vacation was traveling from Ohio to visit Grandmother. While there, we saw other relatives and visited the places in Kentucky that my parents knew from younger days. Those names and scenes are still ingrained in my mind. Their memories transferred to me. Nowadays families take their own trips to Myrtle Beach, The Smokey Mountains, and Florida. Their little families are the focus, and many children hardly see aunts and uncles or cousins. Families are smaller. In the future, if there is a reunion, it might consist of a brother and sister with spouses and four cousins who barely know each other.

My family's closeness comes from those times that we visited on Sunday and played together. Then, there was no trip to the amusement park or a $300 birthday party. Our social life was family.

My generation still has friends who sit and talk. All the kids are on an IPhone to see what others are doing.

I miss the porch talk when I was amazed at what my grandchildren had to say.

Families are smaller than ever but farther apart. As I age, I see the loss of connection among members.

Change and endings. We must learn to be alone.

Lost homes

All along highways and country roads, dark windows stare from forlorn empty houses. Lost houses that sit among the stiff weeds and over grown shrubs tell a story of a family that no longer cared for the memories in a home. A family that needed to move on to something new and better.

Houses show the transitions of current residents and sometimes whole extended families. Back when a family consisted of eight or ten kids, someone always stayed home and took over the original homestead. Now that a family might average two children, those two benefit from their parental attention and are able to attend college and find jobs away from the old hometown. No one is left to take the home and it might be sold to strangers or left unsold among the weeds.

Either way, the setting is changed. Many older homes go to people with no vested interest in maintaining the original aesthetics. That well planned Japanese garden layout needs to be updated to hostas and lilies that are beautiful but take little care in working busy lives. Or the new owners do not relate to the sweat and tears expended to build a home. They paint over oak woodwork and do not trim the hedges. They need an above ground pool for the kids that is soon abandoned and used as a dumpster for broken lawn chairs and red and yellow plastic toys with wheels. Centuries old barns are left to the weather as their roofs wrinkle in storms and never get repaired. Randomly placed pole buildings easily take their place.

Sometimes older homes move into the lives of the young and energetic. New landscaping appears. Twigs are planted in the front yards with wishes of tall flowering shade trees for the hot afternoons of retirement. Every spring, new annuals appear in newly made beds to be mowed around. The house is resided or painted, shutters added or a whole addition appears on the house. Porches and decks appear with fake rattan furniture that will withstand the ages. The home comes alive with activity. The lights are always on.

Other well established homes move past this stage to the empty nests with another flurry of rejuvenation that soon wanes as retirement approaches and the aging couple realizes the children do not come home often, and when they do they urge them to move into a condo. In northern Ohio, many successful retirees are not comfortable in the cold, and they buy Florida condos for the season. Their Ohio homes get pared to a minimum of landscape and care as their bright light is now in the sunny south. Even in the summer, it gets too hot so residents once again abandon the home for a lake house.

As I travel, I try to guess which stage a home might be in. New plants and drives and furniture show love and activity. Pride in the place. Homes to rentals move into disrepair and lack of care for even mowing the grass. Curtains and blinds are awry. The big house on the main road- someone in the house is missing-has a well manicured lawn but no rows of zinnias along the drive. The house goes dark early in the evening. What happened to the family on the corner that made them abandon their home to the bank which has let it all deteriorate beyond hope? For years, I have watched a nearby family home slowly lose its parts till very little of it has a roof and the window left frames a cornfield in the backyard. I wonder if the family fell apart as their family home did.

I feel sad when I see the leftover remains of once thriving families. God bless the people who now demolish the homes they no longer want. They are erased from the land leaving only a stand of shade trees to remind of their existence. And when I forget the house, it will finally be gone. Perhaps next generations, when missing their grandparents, will look at old photos of the homeplace and have reunion picnics under the trees.

They say you can never go home again. But everyone keeps that longing for the original place that really cared for them. We all wish to return to that aged, idealized time and home that was our childhood.