On Saturday night we had a festive dinner in the Common House, celebrating the first 15 years of this community. One of our neighbors has a passion for decorating and for making elegant cakes, and she turned our dining room into a whole new space with blue and white gauzy slip covers over our wooden chairs, and sparkly bows wrapped around the back of each chair. We were all covered with glitter by the end of the evening.
We told some parts of the story of how Blueberry Hill came to be, and Anna reported the results of our recent round of interviews, finding out how we are doing. There were no big surprises. Mostly it was good to be reminded that there are about 60 of us living here, about 50 people who lived here at some point are gone, that there are 26 of us who were here from the beginning, and there are 26 who have moved in in the last five years. That's a lot of new people, and we still have our work cut out for us, helping this community maintain its peculiar identity.
The next day Jon and I went to a potluck lunch, celebrating the recent marriage of two young people from our synagogue. These are two unusual people, and I appreciate them for that. They got married very quietly and then they decided to have a lunch for themselves at a local Nature Center. They are moving out of the area in less than a month, and they have only lived here for a few years, but they have accumulated an interesting group of friends. It was a nice event, and so unpretentious. I have never been to a potluck wedding lunch before.
That night my mother and Michael L. and I went to a funeral home in suburban Maryland to visit with the family of a cousin of my mother's. This cousin's husband died suddenly, but he had not been very healthy. This man had been very kind to my mother over the years, and about 20 years ago he went on a trip to China with my mother and his mother-in-law because all three of them were interested in going, so they went together. These are not church people, so they had a viewing at this funeral home. It was an odd scene, having the man lying at the far end of the room, in his coffin, hands crossed, looking quite preserved, while all the rest of us milled around and chatted. We spent most of our time talking to my second cousins who we have not seen since they were cute little boys. Now they all have children and jobs and wives and houses. It was nice to connect with them -- we knew their grandparents and used to visit them regularly in Hawaii. Their grandfather Norman Au Hoy was close to my grandmother Hana Au Hoy. We all have the same great-grandparents. There was one very cute three-month old boy who looked like Uncle Babe that I got to chat with and hold, and that made my evening.
In between all of that, there was market and CSA and all the usual non-life cycle events.
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