SUMMER VACATIONS

By

Gerry Niskern

Are you a transplant headed home this summer?

Is home where you can find Mama’s luscious lasagna or Aunt Edna’s peach pie with tender crust that rests under a scoop of homemade ice cream?

Perhaps where your clan gathers the tomatoes are big enough to cover a slice of bread and taste like a tomato should. Maybe you’ll have a glass of cold buttermilk out on the porch of the old farmhouse or pancakes with fresh blue berries.

But the truth is, when headed home, everyone is really looking for something more than food when the family gathers. That’s the sharing of family stories.

When we went “back home”  when I was a teen, my first reaction was, ‘I don’t know these people. Why do we have to visit them?’ But soon I found my self hanging around the dining table laughing at the stories being recalled. I was amazed to learn that my very proper daddy had burned down the family garage when he was four

He couldn’t tell his mother it was on fire because he still couldn’t talk very well. “After all”, my aunt explained, “he was the baby in our family and didn’t have to talk”.

Years later, at a family reunion our own  kids heard about how their “safety first” dad went badger hunting with his older gun toting cousins and their pack of Greyhounds in Texas when he was only  five years old.  He was told to sit on top of the Badger hole and another little cousin made to sit on the other hole. The strategy was that they would slow the Badger down when he came out and the older boys could shoot it. However, there was one problem. The Badger just about scratched the five year old to pieces on the way out!

Our nephews who endured their dads lectures on the dangers of smoking, loved hearing about how their daddy was caught many times sitting behind a chair puffing on his uncle’s cigar when he was only two years old.

Everyone, if we are lucky, will have many of these family interludes. The old stories and laughter are the catalyst that holds the clan together. The kids take it all in and realize that when they were growing up, mom and dad were a little naughty sometimes. It kind of levels the playing field, doesn’t it?