A Day at the Beach
Some days, it's almost like we're a family around here. Today, for instance, we went off to the beach. Sarah, Italo's-live-in girl, had asked me yesterday to pick up some meat for a barbeque and so I'd gotten chicken, hamburger meat, hot dogs, hot links and boudin--a creole rice sausage flavored with sage and pork--and then this morning Sarah showed up with chips, crackers, cookies, bottled water, soda, fruit drinks, watermelon, peaches, grapes and made a potato-and-egg salad and a whole lot more. And then she packed two coolers with all of it--Chepa had prepared the chicken, which showed up a bit later--on ice, and D-Ray, Italo's friend who comes around and is sort of part of the family, picked up some beer and everyone looked for every floatation device we own and off we went. Found a pretty spot at Benbrook lake, next to a stand of trees, hung a hammock for the baby and got the floatables blown up while Italo made a home made grill stand and lit a fire and put the grill on and half an hour later, after lots of splashing around, the meat went on.
Heck, I even took family photos for someone's album. Madeleina was wild, as she always is around water, and Sierra was frantically tossing as many rocks as she could. Little Alexa needed breast feeding about every ten minutes; and me, I stood back a bit, wondering how in all goodness I'd come to be part of such a lovely thing and then too, wondering how it had all fallen apart. But I tossed the last away: Today, like our best days, there was no broken anything, there was just what there was: some laughs, some good food, some horsing around and then another pocket full of laughs.
Hope your day went as well. Despite the reason for the holiday and the sadness it brings up--lot of good men and women have died in combat, mostly useless combat, but died bravely nonetheless--it's one of the holidays that, unlike Christmas, which can rent and tear at you, brings families together. And for a little while, for a morning and afternoon, it was nice to be part of a whole one again.
2 comments:
From "Back Briefly" to "A Day at the Beach"
...balancing the beautiful
;)
good to see ya back safe&sound
cheers
m
lol
as I was reading after the breastfeeding part; I thought you were going to say you stood back wondering how you could get in on the action...sophomoric, I know. I'm not even sorry, really, because, I'm still chuckling.
dontcha just love perfect days like that? It was a perfect hot beach barbeque day yesterday.
Thanks for the serious reflection, too. As counterproductive as I think war is, a LOT of people have died being brave. It doesn't even matter the outcome of the war; the outcome of their lives was death (as is everyone's, I know) It makes me think, though...folks think it's such a tragedy when people are killed during wars; and yet, they keep signing up for them. Isn't that what war is actually all about? training killers and then killing until one side gives in?
and is death really such a horrible thing, anyway? sheesh, we all know that there will be some guy at a gate to greet us and take us each to our respective mansions in the sky (thank you delta dawn)
ANYWAY...I'm glad you're home. I hope you don't have a month's worth of catching up to do, and can manage to relay at least a couple stories from this trip.
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