I went home for Thanksgiving.  Got there Tuesday way late at night and left Saturday morning.  So three days, really.  Plus two travel days.  It takes about six and a half hours to get there.

It might take a week to tell you all about it.  Not that it was eventful, really.  Ain't nothing much going in Erie, Pa this time of year.  The sun is long gone but the snow hasn't come yet.  Shame, I told Jake there would probably be snow.  Any other year there most likely would've been.  Then again, I don't think there was snow last time I was there for Thanksgiving either.  That was five years ago.  Jake was up there last year with my dad and his family, and there was tons of the stuff.  He even made his first big snowman.  I think it's neat when Jake does things for the first time with his grandparents.  Everything is better with grandparents, if I remember correctly.  Parents are always bringing you down by telling you to settle yourself and be quiet.

I'm going to work backwards, I think, in recapping the holiday. 
That's the way my brain works.

Friday night all the aunts and uncles and cousins (save for Cory and his wife, who live in St. Louis.  Cory is my only big cousin.  I'm the next oldest on that side and the oldest on the other side) and husband and boyfriend and girlfriends and the two babies piled into my cousin David's house with all the leftovers from the day before. 

Here's the girls.  We all have nice teeth and three out of four of us wear scarves inside the house.  From left to right, Aryn, my only blood related girl cousin.  She's the littlest one I've got.  I think there is five years between us.  Next is my niece Payton's mom Adrianne.  Then Amanda, my cousin David's girlfriend.  She has a little boy too, but I haven't met him.  He was with his dad for the weekend.  Then me there on the end.

It's weird that we are all so grown up.  That we are the kids, but we aren't kids and there is a whole nother set of kids that belong to us.  And there aren't any grandparents left on this side-my mom's side- and now my aunts and uncles and my mom are the old people, and we are in the middle, and our kids are the brats/rugrats/anklebiters/crumbsnatchers.  When did this all happen?  Ten years or so ago I guess, but I didn't notice it so much when it started.  When I'm thrown into it head first, it seems huge.

We kids-not-kids talk about real grown up stuff.  Taxes and death and mortgages and car notes and children and dogs and wellness and cancer and life and hairspray.  In the kitchen, in whispers.  In the living room, loud enough for everyone to hear.  We are included in the Big Conversations with our moms and dads.  We are the moms and dads included in the Big Conversations.  We aren't told to go play.  Or to "get outside and let the wind blow the stink off ourselves".  We sit at the table.  The dining room table.  A dining room table owned by someone younger than I.  We have 30 years of stuff to talk about and we rarely get around to what's happening lately.  Amanda and Adrianne are pretty new to the mix.  It's got to be boring/annoying/uncomfortable/wonderful to sit around and listen to stories about versions of people who they never knew, the same people who are sitting right in front of them.  Or maybe it's not.  I've never had to join into a new family like that.  I met Dave and his family when I was a teenager.  It's not quite the same thing.

I moved away from home when I was two weeks past 18.  Packed up all my stuff in pink and white Baskin Robbins Sugarcone boxes and moved across the state and never moved back.  I've never regretted it, but I'm awfully glad I can go home now and again to the people who knew me when I was 3 hours old and 3 days old and 3 months old and 3 years old and 13 and 23 and 33.