Memories

I have been thinking about my boys and our lives as they were growing up. Did you know we had Family Night on Monday nights. As the boys became involved in the Boys' Club and soccer season became basketball season then onward to baseball season. We did not spend as much time as a family as we did when the boys were toddlers. So we had game night. Monday nights meant playing twister and the game of Life or 500 rummy. I can still remember Josh and Joey laughing as their mother (I) got tangled up on a game of twister. We kept careful score when playing cards and ate pizza and popcorn. When my youngest son was five years old, we had a pool in the backyard . I took Joey to Saturday morning swimming lessons at the "Y" because I feared he would figure out how to unlock the gate to the deck and drown in the pool. Josh and Shaun were already good swimmers because we vacationed a lot at hotels with pools or camped at places with a lake. The boys could dive as well as they did swim and the child whom I feared could drown became a swimmer on the grade school swim team. We were an active family. We played tennis and went skiing. We hiked trails and mountains. My boys grew up walking in old cemeteries in every state while their mother taught them about history. They grew up with a mother who was a lab supervisor at a Bucks County hospital and a weekend genealogist/tour guide. We went on tours in the night with flashlights on Halloween at Laurel Hill Cemetery. Laurel Hill was the same place their mother searched through stacks of records and wrote articles for the newsletter that came out monthly. A mother who conducted tours at the Dresher Morris house in Germantown on Sunday afternoons. Their mother went back to school when the youngest went into first grade and the lab supervisor behind the microscope became the counselor in a mental health facility behind a desk and the educator in front of the class. Their father was into computers and made a good salary and traveled to neat interesting places for business and we would travel with him to Nevada, Arizona, Florida, New Orleans or we planned vacations to Williamsburg, Jamestown, Disney World or the Jersey shores. Ambitious and determined and very competitive were we. And we had our struggles.


I guess it is normal to recall one's past as one becomes older. I remember my grandmother telling stories of her past. There were many happy moments in our lives and despite the difficult times, we never lost focused of what our family was all about. We are strength in numbers. I have three sons and four grandchildren. I raised three boys and now I watch as my two grandsons and two granddaughters grow the very same way my own children grew. They grow up way too fast and as a young mother I was too busy to notice the quickness of time. To grow is to live.


Crayons and coloring books, paper airplanes and puzzles, toy soldiers and baseballs, movies and popcorn, swimming pools and barbeques. I remember every sweet moment. I hope they remember too.