Family Skype

This morning there was a layer of snow covering the sidewalks, and the streets, and the optimistic flowers.  Cats left their footprints in it before it sunk into the playground sand.  It reflected the sunlight up into the buildings and the tree trunks, brightening winter in an upside down sort of way.

I saw it from my window;  and then from miles away I heard my aunt's voice, and my mother's and father's.  I saw my brothers and the huge cat that was just a kitten 6 months ago.  My whole family was gathered last night to celebrate my brother's birthday.  Grandfather, my brother's girlfriend, cousin, too.  They told me about the trial of new gelato, paw paw flavored, a fruit from the midwest or the south of which I had never heard, never tasted.  And my mother sang the two repeated lines she could remember of a childhood song about paws paws, picking them up and putting them in her pocket.  I told her I liked her sweater and we set another date for Skype, one nearly a month away.

There are things that are shade life right now.  There is a color in which I'm embedded and can't even see.  The way my landscape is shaped by the people around me and those far away, by the routines that I fall into and construct, by the books that I read and the conversations that I have, by the pieces I practice, by the themes that I pull out of this daily living and on which I choose to focus.  How can I see their effect?  These temporary things in life.  What stays and goes?  Perhaps it is only relative.

But what came before family?  What has been more consistent throughout all the changes, near or far, for better or worse?  On and on for generations, this personal religion of sorts, handing off from one to the next, changing and growing, but always there.  Around us and inside of us.  As sure as the stars.