![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
So here I am in Iowa. Yesterday was the big family reunion, eight of ten of my mom's siblings were here (Uncle Dave had his flight cancelled, rescheduled, and then cancelled again at the last moment, so he couldn't make it and we're all a bit pissed off) as well as a bunch of cousins, maybe twenty of the thirty of us, and a few people from the older generation, plus assorted siblings' spouses.
That makes for a really full house.
It feels the same way family reunions always feel, which is intensely reassuring. My life's changed a lot on the ten-something years since I've been to one, and I am a different person here, but the cradle or the roots are still there if I look hard enough. It took me a day or two of looking to find them, of course. It's a bit of a gear switch. It's on the same lake it always is, at Rita's house, though she's in a different house this year. I had expected everyone to look much older, but they don't. I guess my eyes have grown as I have.
My mom and my aunt Rita are close, and Rita's kids are the only cousins I've kept up with regularly. It's been really good to see them again. The youngest is about three feet taller than when I saw him last, and he has brown hair instead of blonde now. Everyone else has filled out into these massive, tall boys built like sides of beef. It's such a beautiful thing to be connected to people in this way. I remember my older cousin Justin being sort of godlike in his abilities, and so old and world-wise. Now the little cousins can't tell him from an uncle, even though he's only five years my senior, and he's great with the kids. He did a ton of driving the boat around pulling a tube on the lake, and we talked well into first light one night. He'd worried about me, apparently, last time I came out-- he'd worried I'd go home and kill myself. These are the kind of people who think about you afterwards. I remember he drove me from one place to another in Iowa once, he put on cruise control and crossed his legs in the driver's seat and I was in absolute awe. We wrapped up some loose ends from the last time we'd seen each other.
The little wavelets on the lake are sparkling in the morning sun. There are fireflies in the evenings. It's magic.
My other cousin, Joe, is my age (I'm just about a year older, but not quite). He's so well placed,so suited to his environment, it's a joy to watch him. He has little mannerisms that I remember adoring when I was fourteen, like chewing on the edge of his drinking glass, and yet he's so changed and grown that recognising them is ... oh, I don't know what I'm trying to say. I see my brother, too, grown up with muscles from Ken-do. holding on to the back of a tube and dressing eccentrically, and they're all grown up, all young men. It makes me so happy to see, because this sort of flourishing growth and wellness and coming into oneself is part of the same cycle that death and decay and birth are. I have less experience with it in other people, though. It reminds me that summer also comes.
Anyhow, Joe and I traded memories (I remember when I came to Vancouver and went to /Dangerous Lies/ with your friends, I think because your mom made you take me; I remember when I came out to Iowa and you smeared fireflies and showed me how they left a glow). He brought me a dead firefly, that was still glowing, and was careful to say he had found it and not killed it. He brought me a live firefly.
This is the place I came when I was fourteen and sixteen, or something like that, when things were very bad at home, right before the divorce and maybe afterwards at some point. I definitely think of that as my coming-of-age summer, or maybe all the trips blur into one. Because my home life was so bad then, my family was so numb and incapable of giving much and my friends were too distant to adopt their parents and sort of graft myself on like that, I'd never really been in a place where everyone was freely and generously loving. I came here and they were, it was just here, I didn't have to be anything or do anything or project anything right, they just liked me and loved me because. Just because.
It probably was one of the most significant things in my life. Looking back, I realise that it's what made me think people might be worth giving a try. I learned there might be something special between people after all. I think it's also been a model I've imitated throughout the rest of my life, once I sorted myself out: love people fearlessly and freely, because it's okay. And you know, it's a good model. Love is okay.
It's a lesson I should keep. And it's a lesson I should expand: ten years of seperation doesn't diminish, it changes. I saw that this weekend. Changing is not a problem, it's often an enrichment to the people involved. That's good.
And I think this is the well my love comes from. The soil is deep, here, and it supports that sort of generosity. I feel replenished. I know I was feeling stretched, before, losing sight of what precisely love meant, and what it meant to give it-- I was getting the details confused with the thing, as so many of us do. I was going through rote actions in the hopes that the ritual would bring the feeling, but no, it's the other way around.
So I think I am going back home, when I do, a little bit soothed, a little bit reborn, and a little bit sad from missing these people. I'm trying to get Joe to come visit, maybe it will happen. Certainly I'll need to see them again before another ten years are up.
That's all I have to say.
That makes for a really full house.
It feels the same way family reunions always feel, which is intensely reassuring. My life's changed a lot on the ten-something years since I've been to one, and I am a different person here, but the cradle or the roots are still there if I look hard enough. It took me a day or two of looking to find them, of course. It's a bit of a gear switch. It's on the same lake it always is, at Rita's house, though she's in a different house this year. I had expected everyone to look much older, but they don't. I guess my eyes have grown as I have.
My mom and my aunt Rita are close, and Rita's kids are the only cousins I've kept up with regularly. It's been really good to see them again. The youngest is about three feet taller than when I saw him last, and he has brown hair instead of blonde now. Everyone else has filled out into these massive, tall boys built like sides of beef. It's such a beautiful thing to be connected to people in this way. I remember my older cousin Justin being sort of godlike in his abilities, and so old and world-wise. Now the little cousins can't tell him from an uncle, even though he's only five years my senior, and he's great with the kids. He did a ton of driving the boat around pulling a tube on the lake, and we talked well into first light one night. He'd worried about me, apparently, last time I came out-- he'd worried I'd go home and kill myself. These are the kind of people who think about you afterwards. I remember he drove me from one place to another in Iowa once, he put on cruise control and crossed his legs in the driver's seat and I was in absolute awe. We wrapped up some loose ends from the last time we'd seen each other.
The little wavelets on the lake are sparkling in the morning sun. There are fireflies in the evenings. It's magic.
My other cousin, Joe, is my age (I'm just about a year older, but not quite). He's so well placed,so suited to his environment, it's a joy to watch him. He has little mannerisms that I remember adoring when I was fourteen, like chewing on the edge of his drinking glass, and yet he's so changed and grown that recognising them is ... oh, I don't know what I'm trying to say. I see my brother, too, grown up with muscles from Ken-do. holding on to the back of a tube and dressing eccentrically, and they're all grown up, all young men. It makes me so happy to see, because this sort of flourishing growth and wellness and coming into oneself is part of the same cycle that death and decay and birth are. I have less experience with it in other people, though. It reminds me that summer also comes.
Anyhow, Joe and I traded memories (I remember when I came to Vancouver and went to /Dangerous Lies/ with your friends, I think because your mom made you take me; I remember when I came out to Iowa and you smeared fireflies and showed me how they left a glow). He brought me a dead firefly, that was still glowing, and was careful to say he had found it and not killed it. He brought me a live firefly.
This is the place I came when I was fourteen and sixteen, or something like that, when things were very bad at home, right before the divorce and maybe afterwards at some point. I definitely think of that as my coming-of-age summer, or maybe all the trips blur into one. Because my home life was so bad then, my family was so numb and incapable of giving much and my friends were too distant to adopt their parents and sort of graft myself on like that, I'd never really been in a place where everyone was freely and generously loving. I came here and they were, it was just here, I didn't have to be anything or do anything or project anything right, they just liked me and loved me because. Just because.
It probably was one of the most significant things in my life. Looking back, I realise that it's what made me think people might be worth giving a try. I learned there might be something special between people after all. I think it's also been a model I've imitated throughout the rest of my life, once I sorted myself out: love people fearlessly and freely, because it's okay. And you know, it's a good model. Love is okay.
It's a lesson I should keep. And it's a lesson I should expand: ten years of seperation doesn't diminish, it changes. I saw that this weekend. Changing is not a problem, it's often an enrichment to the people involved. That's good.
And I think this is the well my love comes from. The soil is deep, here, and it supports that sort of generosity. I feel replenished. I know I was feeling stretched, before, losing sight of what precisely love meant, and what it meant to give it-- I was getting the details confused with the thing, as so many of us do. I was going through rote actions in the hopes that the ritual would bring the feeling, but no, it's the other way around.
So I think I am going back home, when I do, a little bit soothed, a little bit reborn, and a little bit sad from missing these people. I'm trying to get Joe to come visit, maybe it will happen. Certainly I'll need to see them again before another ten years are up.
That's all I have to say.
