The best part about this trip was getting to see my cousins, four of them plus spouses. I have six cousins on my mother's side. One I don't have any sort of relationship with -- he's nice and all, but I just don't know him. So that leaves five, and I saw four of them on this trip. Plus everyone's been married for hundreds of years, so their spouses are absolutely my cousins too, which makes twice as many. Pretty amazing. I saw them in two batches, the first get-together being the most special. On Friday Aunt Baba and the twins and I drove up north in our rental car, across the Golden Gate bridge (which the twins had never seen -- "Hey, it's not gold, it's red!") to Kenwood, where one cousin and his wife live, and the others joined us there for a delicious lunch and conversation. Here we are eating outside by the lap pool, which the twins were probably in at the moment I took the photo.
There's a vineyard on the property -- well, much of the property is a vineyard -- and here my cousin is showing the twins the developing grapes as Aunt Baba looks on. (They wanted to know if you could EAT the wine grapes, and he said yes, they're very sweet.) He also has chickens, which we got to see, and the twins even got to pull little blue-green eggs out of nesting boxes, disturbing the hens inside. We had the eggs for breakfast a couple of days later, so fresh.
The visit was sort of in lieu of the cousins hikes that used to be held every summer, and that Rocket Boy and I attended several times, the last few with the twins. What was different about this was of course its brevity -- just a few hours, not a long weekend -- and that meant, I realized afterwards, that I didn't get to talk to anyone in great depth. I could have sat down with every single person there and had a good talk, but instead it was mostly smiles and "I'm so glad we could do this." I had a really really good feeling about the whole experience, but I did miss having all those talks, connecting with people a little more deeply. I adored my mother's family, really truly adored my two uncles and one aunt, plus my two aunts-by-marriage, and I miss every one of them most profoundly, just as I miss my own mother every day. When you get the cousins together, that same vibe is there, and I feel as though I'm home again.A few nights later we went to dinner at the home of the fourth cousin (he lives in Los Altos, not too far from Aunt Baba), and that was different, but nice too. Cousin Jeff lives in the house he grew up in, just as we live in the house Rocket Boy grew up in, but in Jeff's case the house was completely remodeled 30 years ago or so -- actually torn down except for one wall of the garage and rebuilt. So it's not my Aunt Helen's house, and yet it's the same property, with the same magnolia tree in the front yard, and a (replacement) Chinaberry tree in the back. Plus it's full of her furniture, because she collected Asian antiques and Jeff and his wife like them too. So spending time there involves getting confusing whiffs of Aunt Helen which are then drowned out by all the new. Helen died 28 years ago, a few months after my father did, but I was very close to her and I miss her a lot. There are times when I remind myself of her, but I don't know if that's true. Am I like her or did we just get along really well? Probably the latter. She was a very generous, open, friendly person, and I am not. But she also suffered from serious clinical depression, so there's that side too. And we laughed together about almost everything. I remember being with my mother and Helen and just laughing and laughing. A very long time ago now.
Jeff is quite different from his mother, with a tendency to boast a little when talking about his exploits, and this always tempts me to bring him down a little (did I mention already how different I am from his dear kind mother?). I didn't really mean to do it, but when at dinner I was asked about how we were doing, I was honest, and in doing so I seemed to curtail the one-up-man-ship. Jeff looked honestly concerned -- an expression I almost don't ever remember seeing on his face -- and he agreed with me that Rocket Boy's age is probably a big reason why he can't get a job. And then Uncle Jim chimed in and said that he felt so very lucky to have a job at his age. I'll have to ask others who were there if they agree with me that there was a sea change in the conversation right then, because maybe it just felt that way to me.
What else did we do in California? There were a lot of happy, low-key days. We played mini golf with Aunt Nonny on Sunday -- that was pretty fun, though hot, and Kid A did have a meltdown near the end. Possibly it was Kid B's fault and possibly I did not handle it correctly. Whatever. On Monday we had a very nice beach trip with Baba and Lauren. The temperature was perfect, the sky was blue, the ocean was friendly. We played in the waves, ate lunch, built sand castles (mine was the Castle of the Sacred Tortoise and Kid A's kept getting knocked over by the ocean), and played in the waves some more. Around 2:30 we left, because we had a dinner engagement to prepare for. We could have stayed several more hours, but leaving early meant that nobody got too tired and sunburned. It was entirely pleasant.
At the end of the visit the boys couldn't believe it was over. "Why can't we stay TWO weeks, Mom?" they asked me, even as we sat in the airport waiting for our flight, and I had to explain that our blissful vacation involved a lot of hard work on Baba's part and two weeks would probably kill her. But even Baba seemed sad to have us go. As she said, "The next time I see them, they'll be different. They won't ever be these little boys again." I always remember the first time we came for a summer visit -- when they were 15 months old and we rented an apartment and stayed for a month. I think it was our last night there, Uncle Jim didn't go to exercise or something because he wanted to spend one last evening with the boys, and he said it was because they wouldn't be like that the next time he saw them. And of course they weren't, they had moved on to the next stage in their lives. As do we all.
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