Where past and future are gathered

The huge high school I attended. Enrollment was almost 

twice the number of people in the town I grew up in

Illinois.  

"What might have been is an abstraction Remaining a perpetual possibility"

I have returned The Egg to his Small California College, and ferried Crash to Wonderful Jesuit University.  In the interstices of the California trip, I spent a day with a friend I've known for more than four decades, a "sister of another mother," as she would say.

We went to Mass at the parish where we spent high school singing in the folk group, where the "new church" has been redone twice since we first sang there.  We talked and we talked and we talked.  We shared a meal. I met her darling daughter, who is taller than I am (yes, I know, isn't everyone? or at least everyone over the age of 10?). It was a day full of  grace and joy.

California house.  Six kids and a dog.  #NotTheBradyBunch

The Sunday was also the 34th anniversary of my marriage to Tom, an event at which Other Sister stood by me. The 23rd anniversary of my marriage to Math Man is nearly upon us.

I drove up to my dad's the next day and spent many hours with him going through old photographs.  I found a lock cut from my infant mother's hair, still soft and so, so blond. There were pictures of from my dad's extended family going back to the late 19th century. Past and future gathered.

My maternal grandmother wrote many notes about my mother when she was little.  It's odd to read of her hopes and delights when both she and my mother have been gone for so many years.  I wonder (in the abstract) what my descendants will think if they should ever happen upon what I've written.