Holiday Weekend

 The weekend with Andrew and Victoria went better than I dared hope. They are wonderful houseguests. They told us the next day that they had cried in bed Saturday night, after we had sung them good night. But Victoria’s report Monday evening to her mom was that she didn’t miss her because she was having a great time. It was an immersion experience. I had decided not to fret about undone work and just enjoy creating a wonderful holiday weekend for our grandchildren.

Friday evening, Peter and we met in front of the Town Line Diner in Rocky Hill, just south of Wethersfield, Connecticut. Wethersfield has been a source of romance for me ever since falling in love with The Witch of Blackbird Pond in fifth grade. Back in the 1600s, Rocky Hill was part of Wethersfield.

I’ve been driving up and down I-91 for 36 years, going to New Jersey to visit my parents, D.C. to visit the temple (before the 2000 opening of the Boston Temple, which reduced our temple trip mileage 100-fold, from 450 miles to 4.5.) I’ve seen the highway sign for the historic Wethersfield ferry, but never stopped to investigate. Service began in 1655, making it the oldest continuously-operated ferry in the United States.

When Peter got to the parking lot, where we would ‘exchange prisoners,’ we proposed a birthday supper at the diner. I've loved diners longer than Blackbird Pond. I had moussaka and asked the waitress if she was Greek. No, Albanian. We were nearly the only customers and she treated us royally. On Monday, when we met Xiomara at the same parking lot (it’s within two miles of being halfway between our homes), we talked her into a meal there as well.

The weekend felt so spacious. We planned our last day, Monday, on the white board: playground, fly Andrew's drone, foosball, cotton candy, go home.

As the slogan says, “If I’d known grandkids were so much fun, I would have had them first.”

Cotton Candy and Hauling Water

Last week we hosted our annual ‘Summer Retreat’. Two of our children, their spouses, and the three grandchildren came for the whole week. We had never gotten our act together to rent a summer house: when the coronavirus hit, procrastination proved to be an excellent strategy. Instead we invested in making our home a ‘grandchild magnet’. The most popular item was the foosball table. Seven-year-old Andrew became an avid player.

About two months ago, five-year-old Victoria asked for a cotton candy machine. Jim scoffed at the idea, but one of my fondest memories of childhood was the magic of a cloud of sweet fluff. I loved how it melted in my mouth. We experimented with coloring our own sugar, but didn’t like the result. Besides, white granulated sugar is much more inexpensive than the commercially-colored sugar: being the classic under-spender that I am, I went with plain white, pristine as clouds in the sky. Jim continues to improve his technique and can spin them as big and fluffy as my childhood memory.

I lived in Northumberland, a sleepy little hamlet nestled on the Susquehanna, until I was nine years old. A regular summer outing was to Rolling Green, a small amusement park with a large swimming pool, Ferris Wheel, roller coaster, other rides, games, and food. I loved watching the cotton candy machine, with its huge steel drum, as the wispy threads magically appeared and the operator deftly twirled them around the white paper cone.

Andrew and Victoria had enjoyed cotton candy in New York, but it was a new experience for two-year-old Eliza. She watched Jim make one for Andrew and then he asked her if she’d like one. She shook her head firmly. I held out a piece for her to try, but she said, “I don’t like hair.” I laughed and said it didn’t taste like hair: it was candy. She didn’t budge. Watching Andrew and Victoria enjoy their treats, she finally relented.

Before Peter’s family left, we did some yard clean up. Xiomara started emptying buckets of wading pool water onto the garden. Completely inefficient and time consuming, but I felt connected to my garden as we carried water, two gallons at a time, to drench our rhubarb, tomatoes, and raspberries. It’s been a very dry summer and the soil is a dusty brown. When Xiomara was a young girl, she and her sisters carried water home from the river in Honduras. I felt the simplicity of that life as we used the leftover pool water to nourish our plants.