I am staying a bit longer to spend some more time with my aunt and cousin. (It was Hub Man’s idea. Everyone thought him very generous to think of it. But now that I ponder about it, maybe he really needed some time to himself to recover from close exposure to his relatives by marriage…. I will have to investigate this further when I get home.
ANYWAY, I have noticed something about these people. . . Nobody seems to know how to go to bed at night.
Of course I expected to do that while the whole clan was here for the reunion, but most of them left two days ago and we are still going full bore, like the hounds of hell were after us.
Last night was the kicker.
After sending my brother and his significant other off in their trailer, we packed up and made a foray into town for supplies and hearing aid batteries. Then we drove up into the semi-boonies to a mountain lake. We plopped our picnic stuff on a table and took a few minutes to admire the lake. A chipmunk (knowing rubes when he saw them) quickly ate an egg sized chunk out of our loaf of bread. … plastic and all. We ate lunch and my cousin and I then trekked to the other side of the lake to take pictures of the meadow full of pitcher plants and wildflowers. During which yours truly obtained a pretty good sunburned face, just for fun.
When we couldn’t stand any more fresh air, we headed home. Somewhere between the river and Faye lane it was decided we should ask an elderly (90 year old!) friend out to dinner that night. So we swung by her house, clinched the deal and headed home to wash the dust off. (The sunburn didn’t wash off, more’s the pity.)
We then piled into two different cars and collected (as Bookworm would say) our dinner guest and spent a pleasant hour being regaled with hilarious tales of days gone by that certainly made us the noisiest bunch in the small restaurant. (The owner finally came over to our table to say hello. I’ll bet half the reason he did was in the vain hope that he might shut us up a bit.)
THEN we took our guest home and went in to visit for a few minutes and we were given instructions to check out if the quince tree in her yard had fruit coming on and what was going on with her blackberries out back anyway? This of course ended with a search for a bowl to put berries in. We took a round of pictures and swooped out finally to go home for some well earned rest.
I thought.
That’s when the floor show began on the back porch.
At some point our normal conversation turned into a comedy routine and we were howling with laughter. My aunt had to make an emergency run to the bathroom. The neighbors probably thought we were drunk. . . Well come to think of it, a couple of us might have been.
ANYWAY, after the laughter died down I announced my intention to get to bed. I said goodnight and did just that. I did a fair job of imitating someone who was trying to get to sleep when I noticed that the party had moved inside. My aunt and cousin and mom were now in the kitchen cackling like chickens, so I gave it up and went out to see what was going on. Whereupon we commenced an activity that every overtired collection of closely related females who haven’t seen each other in a long time do. . .
We convened a midnight group therapy session.
Of course I cannot reveal to you the details of said therapy because everybody knows that this kind of stuff is confidential. We laughed, we cried, we uncovered a pearl of wisdom.
I will pass on the one thing that we all agreed upon: It is a miracle that men and women ever manage to live together at all. And that our job is to pray for that miracle. This information was only obtained by another emergency bathroom run by my aunt. (She is ever ready to make the supreme sacrifice to get to the truth you see. And that seems to involve, for my family anyway, hilarity on a world class level and at least one emergency trip to the bathroom.)
My head finally hit the pillow at 1 am.
And guess what? Three of the five of us are making an all day sightseeing trip today, that will involve a six hour drive.
I will not be among them.
These people are wearing me out.
But getting worn out has never been so much fun.