Connecticut

Sometimes talking to your children really helps you to see how they see things. Like when my daughter explained to me what she likes about Connecticut.

My parents have a house there near the beach, but we hadn’t been there in three years.  She’d like to go again, she says, and we say maybe.  The summers are always so busy, some of it is because there are other things that they want to do, like the Spanish Immersion program my oldest daughter went to in June, and some is travel that we like to do because, well, because we can.   I only have so much vacation.  But it bothers me that the kids don’t get to go to Connecticut to see my parents at their house, near where I spent almost all of my summers when I was growing up.

She wants to help her Grandma in the garden, she says.  She’s worried that her siblings will interfere with that.  They won’t, I tell her.  How do I know?  I visualize it.  That’s also how I know we’ll have world peace someday.  And though faith does not play a roll in my spiritual beliefs, it does here.  She loves that the house is so open, she tells me, and how it feels to shower all the salt and the sand out of her hair, and the ping pong table in the basement.  Is it still there, she asks.  Probably not, she says.  Why wouldn’t it be, I say (it wasn’t).  My brother’s bicycle from when he was a kid is still there, I say (it wasn’t either).  She remembers all of that and misses it.  She wants to do it again.

I want you to do it again, too, I say.  Let’s make it happen.   Thank you, for getting through to me.  I didn’t say that part.  I just thought it.