Like We Were Younger

I just spent the weekend with my cousins in Oklahoma.  They are both married, and one of them has 2 kids.  Last night a group of us went cosmic bowling, and as I watched my cousin having fun with her 6-year-old son, my mind flashed back to all of us as kids at Grandma's house.

I remember running the fence with Cody, Grandma's husky and playing with the old dirty dishes on the picnic table in the back.  We would pick mullberries from the tree that is gone now and eat them by the handful.  We would put pepper in each other's punch when the other wasn't looking, and every Christmas we'd all sneak upstairs and watch A Christmas Story on the old tv.  I remember Grandma's toys she had-the frog that squirted water in the bathtub and the sesame street house that opened up.  I remember playing hide and seek in Grandma's HUGE backyard, and all of us cousins at the "kid" table in the kitchen and Uncle Dan sneaking in with his video camera.  Reunions are different now, but every once in a while we catch a glimpse of what it was like to be kids again, playing at Grandma's house.

Sometimes I really miss those days, when life was simpler and we all lived closer together.  Now we're all grown up with grown up houses and grown up responsibilities.

However, there's something special and completing about growing up together and being grown up together.  Life is so much deeper and richer as the journey grows longer.  The farther we can look back, the closer to each other we feel.  There's just nothing quite like family.

The cool thing about growing up is that we can still laugh like we were younger.  The years of our lives can't change the memories, and we continue to make new ones.  Thank you to my AMAZING family for this incredible weekend.  I wish it didn't have to come to an end.