***UPDATED*** the music now works on the slideshow – so watch it again!!

Before the precious fall weather slipped between our fingers, my family held a reunion at “the farm”, a rolling landscape of fields, sun-washed with awesome peace.  A lot of my family still lives on the farm where I spent too many of my childhood days to count.  11 cousins, hundreds of acres, a pool, two ATVs = about a million ER visits.  But hey, here we are, alive and well, flanking our 92(? I’ve lost track!) year old Grandma Sara (for whom Sara is named…may she have half this woman’s tenacity).  All of us with scars, and one of us is missing a spleen, but we are tougher for having played and survived our endlessly dangerous games (anyone up for a round of Dark Revenge?).  You won’t find more genuine and perfect people than my cousins.

Note to my family: click on “more pictures” on the right margin of my blog to download these pictures in full resolution.  I put together the pictures in a slideshow with music that I can’t seem to export, despite some fancy tricks at unprotecting the files.  Slightly embarrassing as I know at least 3 cousins in this picture who could do it in their sleep.  So if everyone could hum James Taylor’s “You’ve Got a Friend” while watching the slideshow, that would be swell.

Getting together with my family (all 50 of us!) is always the same feeling: as if not a day has passed since we were last together.  While watching Sara and Avery discover their first wooly-worm, I realized how much of my childhood I take for granted.  It took us over an hour to cover a mere quarter mile on my grandparents lane (I think city folk call it a “driveway”).  Between the rocks, bugs, bean field, cornfied, wind, trees….we could have been out there all day.

The reunion itself was oh-so-very-cool.  We started with formal family portraits at Ware’s Grove, a grove hidden on a hilltop near our farm where our family is buried.  It’s a precious place to all of us.  Back to my cousin Brian’s home (one of five at the farm) for a cookout complete with a face-painter, a magician, balloon animals, and s’mores.  Sara thought she’d died and gone to chocolate child heaven.

As has been my lifelong tradition, I cried to the point of weeping as we pulled away and turned out onto the North Road.  But for the first time, my tears of longing were mixed with tears of joy.  Watching our children (were there 18?) run, laugh, scream and most importantly, DISCOVER, the most important piece of my childhood was so, so sweet.  Maybe even sweeter than unveiling Christmas to them.  So a new generation steps up…oh dear Lord, pray for their safety.  There are no government bodies that oversee the “toys” at a farm!  Listen girls, when your Uncles tell you the bull is nicknamed “Nutsy”…just steer clear of that bull.  Trust me.