More Ways to Tell You are Visiting a Plumber

A water fountain,

a work sink,

a bathroom that is nicer than any in our house, and

all of these are in the garage.

The following smiles are brought to you by Back to School

Nobody does family like M's family does family

One of the events on our summer calendar was a reunion of M’s mom’s side of the family, held in the Tidy Farm Town where M’s mom’s family is from and where M spent some of her formative years, into her moody adolescence. They don’t have these reunions often - the last one was when M was pregnant with the twins, who will turn 6 this fall. And considering the amount of work that goes into them it is amazing they have them at all. But they do the work: months of emailing until every meal is accounted for, figuring out who will bring what, put the food out and clean up. Activities are planned and tents are rented. Fields are mowed, tires inflated, wood chopped, balloons are hung. And then all sixty-something of us arrive. Although there are a lot of activities there is also ample time and space to sit and talk, catch up on lives, gawk at kids growth and ponder the aging of the aunts, uncles and ourselves. The age range this time was two to 101.

Now don’t misunderstand – I love my family and cherish the opportunity to get together with them, which happens much less often than M’s family does. We’ve never had a reunion with cousins and aunts and uncles. But M’s family is different. Consider the first time I met M’s family:

M decided to introduce me to her family at the weekend of celebrations for her dad’s retirement. He had been a pastor at the same church for 15 years or so and his retirement was a pretty big deal. Four of M’s five siblings came, with spouses and kids. The church had special services and a giant potluck. Someone loaned M’s family a large house where we could share meals and play ping-pong.

I am not the church-going type, or to put it another way, I’m Jewish. So when I found myself dressed up and sitting in a pew with all of M’s family except her dad, who was of course up front, I thought it was kind of novel. My extremely limited church experience had never included a Mennonite service so it was interesting to see the lack of ornamentation in the church. It was amazing when they sang and the entire congregation sang in strong four part harmony. And then the special presentations for M’s dad began, with skits and rememberances and it was all very new and quite moving. And then I looked down the pew at M’s family. And they were all sobbing. Every last one of them including the in-laws. A tissue box kept going from lap to lap, up and down the row.

I had known M about four months at that point, which means we were two months from engagement and nine from marriage. And this kind of open display of emotion was not something my family ever engaged in. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I did nothing but sit there and keep listening, figuring this would be over soon and all the sobbing would end.

After the service and lunch we gathered at the ping-pong house and the whole family sat down and one by one talked about what they were doing these days and how that was and what they were feeling and, sure enough, everybody was gushing all over again. This level of unabashed emotion was absolutely not something I had ever experienced in my own family and as I sat there with my future in-laws I was elated and terrified. I’m still not completely used to this aspect of being with them.

And of course, there was no beer. So as noted above, very different from my family.

So there we were heading off to see M’s extended family. Things started well, leaving the house only about a half hour later than we planned. The mountains start about twenty minutes from our driveway, which is where M’s lead-foot began to fight with her thriftiness and the thriftiness won, aided by the $4 a gallon gas. This meant that M (who does most of the driving on our trips) drove uncharacteristically slowly through the mountains. This also meant the risk of carsickness was dramatically reduced, and we made it through the mountains with some groaning and complaining (from both car and children) but no puking or blown hoses.

At our first stop to let the kids out and pee, I also got a cup of coffee at a fast-food joint. Walking back to the van I was about to ask M if she had brought much cash when she asked me, slightly panicked, if I’d seen her purse:
“Yes,” I said, “in the hat and glove boxes by the front door before we left.”
“Did you put it in the car?” she asked.
“Um, should I have?”
“Well, did YOU bring any money or a cell phone?”
At that moment I realized I had just spent 33% of the cash we had with us on a small cup of weak coffee.
“Don’t worry, I brought the checkbook” which I fished out of my backpack to find it had - one – check left in it. We also had one credit card with us so we weren’t really any worse off than our parents were in all the family trips we’d ever been on when we were kids. But since we are way too cheap to actually get a cash advance from our credit card we opted to sponge off family whenever we needed cash. Which in these modern times is seldom.

We got there eventually. The first night M’s family stayed at a motel together which gave us an opportunity to – yes – sit around and share again, as a big group. The kids also got to swim in the pool. The next morning we moved to M’s Uncle C and Aunt G’s house. Uncle C is a retired plumber. When they first retired they did what a lot of formerly hard-working retirees do, which is they bought a giant motor-home and drove it around with a car flopping along behind it. But they got tired of this pretty quickly and decided that retirement was for the birds so they went to their church and asked for something to do and were promptly sent to a small village in Guatemala to build schools and dorms and they’ve been doing that, eight or ten months a year, for years now. I look forward to retirement to putter and ride my bike but I guess they aren’t putterers.

That weekend in the Tidy Farm Town the Amish and Old-Order Mennonites were having a big flea market and sale for charity so we got to see a lot of those folks walking around and enjoying the weather and company. They don't like to have their pictures taken but their horses don't seem to mind.

Nor do their buggies.

Back at Uncle C and Aunt G's place;

Camp is being set up (no that's not our Westy, but it is our tent in the foreground and some of our clothes on the line), and;

Catch is being played, and;

Uncle C has started cooking on his elevated fire, which is something he learned in Guatemala. Under the fire, in the box, is wet dirt. This way he can cook over an open fire without having to bend over. Some of us were sure this contraption would burn to the ground before the weekend was over.

It was working fine when we left.

Of course, there were two more fires. The firepit is in the back, for recreational purposes, and the steaming cauldron in the front for hot water. And if you are wondering what we did with the water from the steaming cauldron, we mixed it with the cold running water from the sink mounted on a fence.

Have I mentioned Uncle C is a retired plumber?