Hug
Your face looks beautiful! I didn't know how you'd look. Well, you look so so good!
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Doesn't she look good.
Hug
Oh Sara, I am so so happy to see you!
Hug, hug
Admit it, those of you who have lost a loved family member, isn't it good to feel a little piece of them still alive when you are surrounded by family?
Where am I? Perhaps my all time favorite spot in the world. Lying on a white wicker sofa of the Oceanside porch in Windsor, Vero Beach. You can smell the salt, see the ocean's blue-green-gray color I tried to match on our Winter Park walls, hear the waves crashing feel the humidity.
Summers when I was little, we would stay with my Gramma and Grandpa Correll at a house on the ocean in Bay Head, NJ. Our little family of three, plus aunts and uncles and cousins. As an only child, I learned about having a big family there. So much more action than the other nine months of the year in our home in Easton.
Friday night the men would arrive from work to spend the weekend with us kids and moms. It was lobster and clams. I would do races with the lobsters in the basement Friday afternoons, no wonder I couldn't eat them Friday nights. I would help in the kitchen by sneezing the clams seven times. You put them in the huge pantry sink and pour cold water over them, shake in pepper. They sneeze, and out comes any dirt and sand.
Another memory, when I was about ten I had a deck of bird cards, cards with details on that birds' migratory patterns, their physical description, habitats, etc. I remember going around to the adults on the weekends when they were sitting on the ocean porch with a cocktail, asking them to quiz me on a bird, handing them the bird deck. So you wonder why I was once locked in the closet by my older, far cooler cousins?
The ocean brings me back to summers as a kid. And brings my childhood closer. My Aunt comes out to chat, takes a dead geranium flower in her fingers and snaps it off. The sharp unmistakable geranium stem smells of summers in Easton PA and Bernardsville NJ. Mom and Gramma, respectively, also tended to their geraniums while chatting away with me and others sitting outside on porches.
Mack and Tray are with her family in Virginia. Mack's Gramma Correll's stuffing was a hit, as was Tray's Mashed Potatoes and her Green Bean Casserole. Mike and Corey are playing golf. I am about to nap. In five hours we will join the rest of the country in Thanksgiving dinner.
Time marches on. Let us notice the precious moments that are contained in the march. And then comes thankfulness.
How could I possibly be thankful if I don't stop to notice the moments?
