All posts tagged: familiy memories

Leaving home. For good.

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The WideEyedParents must have been insane in 1980. Or incredibly tired of Philadelphia. Because they bought a ramshackle Victorian farmhouse that stank of dog pee and had questionable electrics in a rural New Jersey town along a remote marine estuary. The paint peeled. The ticks out in the yard bit. The lights flickered when the wind blew too hard. I for one, preferred to avoid the spooky front hall – still don’t like it to this day. Our fictive kin the WideEyedHeinrichs, came for the first annual Memorial Day picnic in 1981. We kids drank ourselves sick on store brand orange and grape soda while our parents lounged on the epically huge screen porch. We didn’t know it yet in 1981, but that screen porch would become the summer epicenter of our lives there.  Last week I couldn’t watch when two of the WideEyedBrothers moved the old wicker furniture off of the porch and onto the moving truck. We all expected my parents to die there. Not, like, tomorrow, but eventually. But then all of …

50 Years of Funk

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It is a little complicated and I heard different versions of the tale floating around over the weekend. One way or another, my WideEyedParents fled south to North Carolina and got married in 1963. They married with little consideration for the impact of a July wedding date on their forthcoming 50th wedding anniversary party. It was warm. Fifty one parents, kids, aunts, uncles, cousins, first cousins once removed, twice removed in all directions, second cousins, fictive kin cousins, grandparents, in-laws, and yet to be born WideEyedFamilyMembers sweltered in the humid July afternoon of rural-ish Virginia over the weekend. We feasted on Jinx’s masterful barbeque from the Pit Stop in Charlottesville. (Just in case Jinx is reading this, we promise, no one put the cole slaw on the pulled pork Memphis style. They were kept strictly separate.) We drank a rootbeer keg dry and made poor showing on the wine and beer. Evidently the kids were thirsty and the adults are too old to properly attend to a keg. We talked and feasted and toasted into …