be fine. So we all three lounged on the couch, Melinda offering food and Jon and me groaning at the thought. And Jon groaning at our “chick-flick” taste in movies, too.
I did get to the Kimball Museum with Melinda, which was a good excursion. She’s a docent there, and had to give a talk at a members’ reception the evening I arrived. So I tagged along on her tour and meandered around the museum. It’s a small place, but a quite lovely one – a “jewel,” as they say. And visiting there, comparing favorites with Melinda, somehow got me started on a series of museum stops in cities across the US and Canada, which has been a lot of fun.
My cousin Sandy has recently married, and I was glad to have a chance to meet her new husband. And to see her again, as well as her thirty-something daughter Jessica. My family has never been particularly close, and for much of my life I’ve only seen my cousins, especially second and third cousins, at big family gatherings. Being on the road, I’ve gotten to know at least a few of them as individuals, and spent time with them at their homes. So visiting Sandy was fun. She’s frenetic and enthusiastic, talkative and full of tales about the family and her life. And sometimes quite goofy - she doesn't really look like this photo! Her stories about her daughter provided an interesting counterpoint to the tales I’d heard from Jessica about her mom a year earlier at the big family reunion in Pennsylvania. I guess that’s part of what families are about – endlessly talking about each other, comparing notes on our different perspectives on each other’s parents, finding out things we didn’t know about those closest to us from those a bit further away. I suppose someone’s talking about me, too, but that would be the price I have to pay for talking about them.
