When I wrote about home, my cousin commented... It's because home is where ever they [your parents] are.
I can't begin to explain the strong sense of family we have. I always felt a certain sense of pride that one of my parents' "best friends" were my aunt and uncle. We did a lot with my cousins--on both sides of my family. And even my cousins who lived out of state were never far from our thoughts. When they came to visit, I remember long nights on my grandmother's screen porch with my Uncle Orlando telling stories, my Aunt Sarah laughing, the warm summer night, and all us cousins being allowed to stay up late. And we hung around the adults.... That was significant, I think. It wasn't like the grown-ups were having their own conversations and we kids were shooed off to another part of the house. We were fascinated with the adult conversation and the stories and the laughter. We were asked about our lives and what we were doing and our opinions. We kids were important in the family. What a wonderful, loving way to grow up! I absolutely adored all my aunts and it meant a lot to me to name my first-born after my aunt Sarah. I love that my sisters now play such an important role in my daughters' lives.
Grandma's porch... It was all of about 10x12'. It was built on a thick cement slab which meant it was cool in the summer. It was screened on three sides and opened to her dining room on the 4th side. We'd gather out there for family dinners, all squeezed around a fold-out table. Or sit on various chairs after dark under the light of a few lamps in the summer heat, telling family stories and laughing together. Or making ice cream on hot afternoons, taking turns turning the hand-crank ice cream maker. Fresh peach ice cream was my favorite. We'd chip away at an ice block in Grandma's laundry tub in the basement, bring the ice chips up to the porch, crank the ice cream, and get to lick the dasher when it was all done. Grandma Helen also had a wonderful tree in her back yard that was fun to climb and had a home-made swing in it...a wood plank strung with thick rope. Once in a while we'd set up her croquet set, but I know her back yard wasn't that big. Later on, I have some wonderful pictures my sister took of my girls when they were about 2 and 4, smelling all the flowers Grandma had planted around the perimeter of her back yard. They're darling pictures.
Grandma had a back bedroom that was full of all sorts of "treasures" from her world travels. Music boxes in particular. When Grandma Helen died, we each got one of her music boxes. Mine is one of an old fashioned Santa with a sack of toys and the woodland animals gathered round. It doesn't play, but it's a quaint piece of folk art. My Sarah drew a wonderful picture of it that I used for a Christmas card one year. In addition to Grandma's music boxes she had a gazelle skin from one of her trips to Africa, various small instruments, hats, jewelry, coins, and other artifacts from her travels. It was a fun room to look through.
Upstairs she had an old steamer trunk full of clothes that we would dress up in. We cousins would spend entire evenings creating "plays" around whatever costumes we'd assembled and then go present the plays for the adults. My dad and both his sisters had been involved in theater in one form or another, so we cousins had grown up around community theater. We had great fun creating our characters and stories.
Grandma prided herself on her cooking. All of us have a cookbook of her recipes that I helped her type up and organize. One of the most prized recipes of all is her Christmas Caramels. I make them every December and my siblings fight over them. When I create my large plate of Christmas cookies, the caramels always go first. I usually prepare small bags of just caramels for them to take home. And every year, when I put the first one in my mouth, I close my eyes and I remember.... I'm a kid again, standing in my grandmother's house with her Christmas decorations up, with family there, and I am home again.
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