After the cousins....

The house is quiet.... my two cousins are at the airport now.... Miss C is on her way home towards Galveston as I type.... and my husband is at work. We all had a great visit these past three days, and C told me that she feels 'part Italian' now after listening to my cousins and I reminiscing about family holidays and 'the old days with Grandma and Grandpa.'  At one point, when we were talking about the big Christmas dinners we used to have, with the adults in the dining room and the kids at the children's table in the kitchen, C looked at me and said "You people are hysterical!"

The weather wasn't as warm as we were hoping for, and the first day it just rained and rained... but we managed to show my cousins a bit of our town, and they did appreciate the quaintness of it all. When we were walking along the main shopping street in town, my cousin S told me "There's only three people in this town... you must know everybody!"   I explained to him that if it had been a sunny and warmer day, there would have been more people out and about.  "Okay... that means there must be a dozen people in this town!"

My husband taught my cousin's daughter how to drive the riding mower and she spent part of one afternoon driving up and down the road with it, learning how to make sharp turns when my husband set up an obstacle course of trash cans. I think that was the favorite part of B's visit here... being in control at the wheel of the mower and yelling out "Yeee-haaaaw" when she passed our house.

When cousin S walked through our house for the first time, he realized how similar this house is to my grandparents' house back in New York, and he commented on that. I told him that's what made me fall in love with this big old house in the first place.

It was a very nice visit... went by very quickly since we had just the three days, and I'm glad Miss C was able to be here to meet them. My cousin S has already invited C to visit them in Florida, or come with my husband and I the next time we go there to see them. The dining room was filled with old family stories, and lots of laughs... and once again, I'm reminded that there's nothing like family because they share the same history and even though we've all had our differences from time to time over the years, you can always go back and start all over again as if nothing at all had happened.