family

Best Thanksgiving Ever

 in Gratitude / Snowbirding / Wildlife/animals  tagged beach house / Dolphins / Emerald Isle / family / North Carolina / Thanksgiving by

A few years ago I managed to gather our family in a beach house on North Carolina’s Emerald Isle for Thanksgiving week.  I’m still overjoyed when I think of it.  We walked the beach, played in the waves, collected lost treasures, watched dolphins, danced, cooked, explored the island, and bonded.  Some met our baby granddaughter or new son-in-law for the first time.  Our three-year-old grandson met the ocean.  He ran 50 yards to escape an incoming wave.  How was he to know how far that wave would chase him?  My mother, who was still adjusting to life without her husband […]

Knitting Connections

 in China / Gratitude  tagged connecting / conversation starter / expats / family / great grandmother / hand crafts / Knitting / Mona Gardner / Shawna Williams / travel by

This post is borrowed from my daughter Shawna Williams who lived in China for three years.  To read more of her exploits click on this link:  https://americaninchengdu.wordpress.com/ August 20, 2010 I’ve discovered that a good way to strike up conversations with Chinese strangers is to knit in public. I think this is because Chinese people assume that knitting is a Chinese thing, so they figure that a knitting foreigner must be picking up local habits. On a recent four-day trip from Chengdu to Beijing via Shanxi Province, a man in a bus station mimed knitting and gave me a thumbs-up, and a few […]

Have You Seen My Mother?

 in Gratitude / Peru  tagged family / Mother / Peru / travel by

      When Mom was two or three, she told her mother something that sounded like “yammer yada blaa boo” to my busy grandmother.  Mom put on her mother’s high heels, packed up the cat and a little rocking chair and set off to visit her grandfather who lived three-quarters of a mile or so up the road.  But Mom didn’t take the road, she dragged the chair and cat cross-country through ditches and fences, gulches and cactus. Her mother enjoyed the quiet for a while then realized what was missing and panicked.  Mom’s father had no trouble following the high-heeled […]

Beach House Thanksgiving

 in Gratitude  tagged Atlantic / beach / beach combimg / celebrations / family / Thanksgiving / waves by

As I mixed Grandma Marie’s stuffing this morning, I dredged memories of the celebration opus our family built around a Carolina beach house last year.  I wanted a full house for Mom, too long alone with her grief.  We all love her, but the kids are scattered from the Atlantic to the Rockies and ever so busy grappling life’s dragons.  Thanksgiving week on the beach proved an ideal no-refuse-offer. The waves, foamy gray, loomed so high that the sun sometimes shone through, illuminating the living green within.  One monster put three-year old Conner to flight.  His sprint propelled him ten times beyond its reach.  He’d never been to the beach; how was he to know what a wave might […]