When Gary and I were first married, among the many firsts for both of us was the "first" of having our three grandchildren for holidays and summer vacations. They were nine, five, and one. We didn't take Sami, the one year old, til she was three, but Jake and Cassie were packed and ready to go to our house in Madison, WI, every Christmas vacation, spring vacation, and two weeks every summer.
All the way to Madison they played rocket ship in the back seat, constructing an elaborate system of communication between each other using Jake's K'Nex. When we stopped to eat along the way, they had to carefully slide out from underneath the rocket ship paraphernalia before they exited. The same happened getting back into the car.
"Captain! Captain! The aliens are coming!" Cassie would say.
"I see them. They won't get away," Jake would respond sounding like William Shatner. "Take that!" and the gun spluttering sound that only boys can make would commence.
Over the years, the three of them learned to hoe a garden and pick vegetables, make quilts and pillows, make homemade egg noodles for chicken and noodles, roast marshmallows over the gas burners on the kitchen stove, construct tents over the clothesline, take nature walks (with a detour to Dairy Queen,) and eat out a lot. They were good times, funny time, times of just being glad we were all together.
One year Sami was old enough to come along. She woke us up late at night to kill the 'pider on the ceiling of her room. She made Godzilla faces. She did everything the big kids did and that was something. And so we all went to the University of Wisconsin Geology Museum on campus, we went underground to explore the Cave of the Mounds, we explored The House On The Rock and Ronald Reagan's boyhood home in Dixon, IL. We toured the Veteran's Museum in Madison, the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, IL, and a host of other places. In between we went to lots of movies and parks.
And then, they grew up. And we moved closer. The same town, in fact. At first we saw them all the time. We drove them to museums around here, we ate out, we maintained some of the traditions we had created in Madison. But over the seven years we have been in Valparaiso, they have grown beyond most if not all of what we used to do together. Cassie and Jake are in college. Sami is halfway through high school. And we are feeling old in so many ways.
Today, Jake and his friend Andrew are installing new kitchen sink faucets for us. The old ones were installed in 1962. That about says it. Last fall they tore out a basement window frame that was rotting away, and completely constructed a new one. As I am writing this, they are under the kitchen sink, yanking out the old fittings, asking do I have this or that, and otherwise chatting back and forth the way men on the job do. It is also the way Jake and his sisters used to chat while their hands were busy sewing, painting, cooking and baking, and making gifts and crafts, and it occurs to me that all of that play when they were little, the making things, the working with us on new projects and learning new skills, all of it is like so many tiles in a beautiful mosaic that is our family's life together, that is their own individual lives.
There are many other tiles, from times and experiences with their other grandma and grandpa and relatives, from school and friends, from gains and losses, from pets, from jobs, from school, from sports. But my heart is full today as once again Jake (this time Jake, the plumber) is back at Grandma's house and for this short time, I feel like the years have not passed, that I am not old, that he is that cute little guy who posed in a photo holding a huge zucchini squash because he thought his mom would like it, that time has stood still by virtue of all of the similar memories.
I took pictures today. From under the sink Jake asked why I always take pictures. It's so that when I am too old to remember all of the wonderful times with the people I love, I will have pictures to remind me.
Thanks, Jake and Andrew, for giving me more pictures to remember and for a job well done!
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