Family Business

This weekend has been a bowl of broccoli and cheddar soup… one of my many faves. It was warm, substantial and filling. I spent time with those whom I love dearly. The very people that play an essential role of who I am and who I am becoming. My parents, my husband and our princes… minus one. Weekends like these should occur more often if only time allowed. I would have never thought that I could be away from my parents for as long as I do at times. I would have never thought that I would work so hard during the week that when the weekends arrived I would just want to rest. Life happens, teaches and creates reality. I know that I am not the only one that wishes for the hands of time to be turned back. If only for a little while. If only to one day or event. For myself,  that wish has never been for the sake of reclaiming youth. Instead  it would be spent recapturing the strength of the ties that bind. Family. I remember when my cousins and I would be at our grandmother Julia Mae’s house on The Hill -a section of Madison, that proceeded the tracks. We would collect cans, sell them and start our journey. My cousins Courtney, Troy, Meghan, my brother Chaun and I.  Ria Janes (that’s how I remember saying it) for shrimp baskets and then either Mr. Biggen’s or the Hill Store. We’d get soda’s and frozen cups, divide our food and have what we considered a miniature feast. We would walk to all those places without an adult and no one ever bothered us. No one ever approached us. No one just looked at us and thought we were up to no good. We were just a small group of kids enjoying a Saturday. As we got older, we stopped. Our spots closed. They were too dangerous for us to walk to or we just grew onto something us. Our grandmother moved. Either way our seafood Saturdays stopped and they were not replaced with anything else. We stopped.

When I think about it now that was the first family thing to stop in my life. The next were the fish fries at my grandmother Liller Lee’s. We… my parents, my brothers, my aunt, my uncle, grandfather and cousin would gather and watch wrestling. My grandmother would make homemade biscuits, grits and fry fresh fish. I can smell the fish now, even taste the warm biscuits dipped in cane syrup. My, my, my… The last things to stop were the Thanksgiving dinners… well post-Thanksgiving dinners at my grandmother Julia Mae’s. I say post because we would all meet up at her house the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Everyone would bring a dish and we would eat, laugh and love. I’m not sure about all families but the ones that I know and from my experience -once grandmother is gone so are the traditions. I wish I could go back to those days. The days when family would gather, parking cars wherever they would fit. Running out the back-screen door to where the men were sitting, talking and drinking to tell them that the food was ready. Getting the middle seat at the children’s table. Aunts wanting to know who favored which aunt’s dish more than theirs without asking directly. The next event would be planned while cleaning the kitchen after everyone had ate. Everything then was about family and for whatever reason time, life, death, distance the bonds shifted a bit. I just want to go back to when it was all about family. No matter what. It was all love.