"Family isn't about whose blood you have. It's about who you care about."

Its been ages since I've written, I know.  So much and yet so little has happened.  I get up, I work, I come home, We play, I get spit up upon, I go to sleep.

The baby rolls over now.  For a while he kept getting his arm stuck underneath him, and it caused him no end of wailing frustration, but that phase has passed and now he holds himself up on his elbows like a bored boy reading comic books.  Locomotion is next, and soon, I fear.

Here we are on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, at my Grandparent's farm, gathering greens with which to decorate my mother's house.  My Grandparents both passed away many years ago -- I'm ashamed to say that I cannot recall the year that either of them passed.  My Grandmother died before the baby's father and I were together, so it must have been 15 years ago or more now.  My Grandfather did meet My True Love many times before he left us.  My son is named for him -- and for his father, too.  Funny how these two most important men in my life shared the same name, yet neither were ever called by it (and my son is not called by it either).

My grandparents basically raised me, as my mother moved to Maine from NYC to raise her baby in a cleaner, more supportive environment.  So I had the luxury of growing up with three parents, and running free in the beautiful woods that surround the farm where my grandparents lived.  They bought 90+ acres of land in Maine in 1965 (including a ten-room farmhouse with attached barn and two outbuildings) for $13,000, and struggled for years to pay it off.  But pay it off they did, and after my grandfather died my greatest fear was that my mother would be forced to sellt the land for taxes and those beautiful woods and fields and rock walls where I roamed would be destroyed for sub-divisions, or worse.  Instead, my mother has created a land trust, so the farm will stay in our family for

generations.  We have tennants living in the house now, and they have a little boy who shares my grandfather's name too, and he runs wild in the woods where I roamed as a child.  Up in the loft of the barn The boy's father found the swing that my grandfather built for me when I was a child, and he's rehung it from the highest rafter, so the The Boy can swing where I once swung.  When we were there on Thanksgiving, the boy's father clucked over our little baby boy, and told me to come by, any time, when I was ready for our baby to swing on the swing too.

Now I'm crying as I'm writing this.  So much love they had for me, and I am so proud to have brought this beautiful boy into the world.  I hope I can pass the love and reality of their lives on to him -- that they aren't just "my great grandparents," those people who live only in photographs on the mantle piece.  I hope, too, that he is able to learn to love the land at the farm as I do, even though distance and those pesky too-low ceilings keep us from living there full time as we would like.  I can't wait to show him the beaver dam, and the wide stone walls built by 19th century farmers as they tried to clear fields for crops, and the giant granite rock shaped like a dinosaur head that a glacier left laying on the hillside a million or so years ago.  I can't wait to teach him an oak from an elm from a birch tree, and to lie on the hill with him and watch the clouds and listen to the chickadees sing. 

But all of that will have to wait.  He needs to learn crawling first.