It is 5 AM, Denver time, and I have this entire floor to myself. I am sitting in the living room at Charles and Lee Lee's and all is quiet, even the bunny in its cage. Upstairs my mother and Michael are sleeping in the master bedroom, Anna and Gordon are in Hugh's room, Lani is in Ella's bed. Downstairs Charles and Lee Lee are in Tillie's bed and Tillie is in the guest bed. Ella is away at a friend's, probably so all of this could work. I woke up partly because most of the air in my mattress had leaked out over night and partly because it is really 7 AM for me. (Jon is in North Carolina at a small reunion of college roommates and Hugh is at Oberlin.)
Back at home, if all is going well, there are four separate teams at four separate markets. At this moment they may be putting up tarp frames, setting up tables, bagging spinach. We don't have much to sell this weekend, especially since we are spreading ourselves across so many markets for the first time this year, but we have plenty of spinach for all. It is gorgeous.
Anyway, we have gathered here to celebrate Charles' 50th birthday. It is possible that we were all here for his 40th, but I don't think so. It was a big party and apparently it took him months to recover from the shock of being at the center of so much attention (he seemed fine at the party but it took a lot out of our introvert brother and he didn't want to do that ever again). So this time we decided to bring the Saturday Family Dinner to him.
It won't be a very interesting part of the story later, but since we have only just arrived, our travel stories are still newsworthy. Anna and Gordon came out to Denver a few days ago and they were already situated and available to make the multiple airport runs that would be necessary to collect us all up. Lani arrived first, without incident, and hung out with Anna and Gordon. We rarely see Lani at a family dinner, so this is a coup. I dropped off my mother at Dulles at 7:20 yesterday morning for an 8:30 flight. She got through security and arrived at the gate in plenty of time, but it ended up being the wrong gate and she missed her plane. It took her all day to get on another flight, but she finally succeeded. I had no mishaps on my flights but we had to circle around for a while waiting for the thunderstorms to clear and the airport to reopen. Michael was coming from Seattle where all the passengers had to disembark due to some mechanical issue and get on a different plane. In the end, the three of us were retrieved together even though we were originally scheduled to arrive at inconvenient two hour intervals.
As we sat around the dinner table, we noticed that every single one of us had graduated from Oberlin except for Tillie who is in high school and still has potential. Not only that, but both my mother and Anna had married twice and each of their husbands were Oberlin graduates. Consistency is supposed to be the hobgoblin of small minds, but I don't think that applies to this particular family.
In addition, we noted that 7 out of 8 of us have the same last name, despite a variety of marital statuses. Anna recently went back to her original name and Gordon is officially one of us too. What a funny family.
This morning we have a date at 7:30 to sit down together and go through the "Five Wishes" exercise. We meant to do this at Anna's birthday but we forgot and this is better anyway because the group is more complete. I will report on this discussion later.
Lani and Anna and Charles and I have an erratic tradition of weekend retreats together, started about 15 years ago, I'm guessing. We got the idea from Betsy who also has three siblings -- they used to go on sibling retreats before their brother moved to Prague and made it rather impractical to plan a casual gathering. Every one of our retreats has been memorable. We used to be more ambitious and go camping (could tell long stories about each of those trips) and sometimes we rent a cabin in a remote park and sometimes we all stay in one motel room together. We always eat our favorite childhood foods, we laugh a lot, we have important and non-important conversations, and we usually do something mildly athletic. Once Anna and Charles went downhill skiing while Lani and I stuck to cross country skis. Once we nearly killed ourselves snowshoeing at 10,000 feet elevation (we were in no danger except that there wasn't enough oxygen available for me and Lani). Once we went all the way to Mexico and went snorkeling. Three out of four of us threw up on that boat trip.
Anyway, we have long talked about bringing others with us on our retreats. It is hard to make that happen because it is already hard enough to organize ourselves to get away. It takes us at least a year to identify a three or four day stretch that we can all set aside simultaneously. My siblings are impossible. I am the only one with a seasonal work life (which means that our retreats are almost never in the summer) and they are always busy, year round. SO, here we are on our Extra Large sibling retreat, sans Jon and Kathy. There will be a follow-up report, now that the stage is set.
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