Kimberlee K.

I fell into a routine of doing these every other month, but then, some months just have a day you want to write about. Days you want to squeeze like a wet towel so you can wring out all the tiny details and get them down on paper so you can remember them for much longer than you might have otherwise.

And this was one of those days.

We will skip over the part where, on a cloudy morning walk, I apparently got too close to a tree containing both a nest and an overprotective mama bird, the latter of which proceeded to swoop at me aggressively.

Though it did make for a funny story, I suppose.

I walked in the door of my parents’ house a few hours later, veggie tray in hand, unable to withhold the near assault for more than a few minutes. But then I relaxed. I leaned my elbows on the kitchen counter the way my mom and I do when we’re feeling casual, and I ate pita chips and hummus and the cold, crispy carrots off the veggie tray. I hugged my brother and my cousins that had driven in from Arkansas a few days earlier, and then we all filed outside, where the heat had died down and there was a nice breeze and ample seating and my dad’s well cared for collection of plants.

The next hour brought arrival after arrival of family that I see both regularly and infrequently. Family that often reminds me of being kid, of Christmases and Thanksgivings with grandparents that are no longer with us, of houses we no longer live in that used to be next door to each other.

Looking around the backyard, I thought we’d be proud of who we all ended up becoming—who we are actively becoming each day. It’s rare to keep up with everything going on in someone else’s life, but family gives you a through line—a way to know the highs and the lows—and we’d all arrived on this Saturday afternoon after years of coming through both.

There was an ease, a quietness and comfortability that saw people moving from place to place without worry. Conversations joined conversations and the occasional game of cornhole was played. A newly gifted bubble gun played “Under the Sea” nearly nonstop for 4 hours. And catch up questions over Mediterranean food started with, “by the way” and “oh also!” and “speaking of” as the afternoon slipped by without us realizing it.

A game of Jenga left us all silent and watching, everyone at the table still, the backyard swing in mid-pendulum. Once it fell, a carton of homemade chocolate chip cookies made the rounds, each time coming back lighter and emptier, as beer bottles and cans of Poppi cracked and popped and fizzed.

The solar powered bird bath waned as the sun began to set, and a soupy bucket full of flowers, rocks and sand sat as evidence of a day well spent outside. We took a group picture, unafraid to scrunch together so everybody was in it, and went down the line hugging each other, like we have for years and years.

I returned to the kitchen counter and leaned, eating one Oreo, two, as my ten-year-old cousin scrolled through the photo album on her mom’s phone, taking me through their last six months of memories. Then we went out for frozen yogurt and laughed next to a fire that cut the chill out of the breeze, watching videos of all the ways the offer of a fist bump could be turned into a tiny prank—“snail!” “turkey!” “ping pong!”

As a kid, I didn’t know that days like these would be fewer and far between. That life would create natural distance, add unavoidable busyness, and send us all different ways. Because back then we were all there, together, in one place, on one property, running back and forth between houses, knocking on each other’s doors.

But I also didn’t know what it would feel like to be an adult, to have us all go and try and learn and still have each other to lean on and come back to and hang out with. To go years without seeing each other all in one place and still have it feel easy. And to know that whenever we get the chance to do it again, it still will be.