Outdoor blogging

This will just be a quick post and I am composing it while outside with my grand kids, by which I mean my dogs.  One is sniffing in the dark and the other is trying to eat bugs.  I wasn't sure my wifi would reach out here.  It does.  Rad.

It's a cool, fall Montana night.  The wildfire smoke has cleared from the air, the stars are out, and it's just cool enough that I need my sweatshirt.  Pretty soon, people will be lighting fires in their fireplaces, perfuming the air with that nostalgic scent that goes so well with a crisp autumn evening.  Ok, I know, burning wood is bad for the environment, and I'm trading wildfire smoke for fireplace smoke (there is a difference, as most of you know), but for my vision's sake, set global warming aside for just one moment and come back with me.  It's my favorite time of year.  Apple cider, caramel apples, cool weather, snuggling in blankets.  I love it.

Moment ruined.  The girls ran to the front gate, barking furiously, and I swear I heard someone whisper "hi" to them.  I bailed on my fall night revere and booked it to the house and locked the doors.  I guess we'll take that final trip outside when Jocie gets out of the shower.

That seems like a good place to say goodnight.  Good night, Gracie.

Bittersweet Symphony and Pizza

            It’s been a year since our father found Janelle and I on Ancestry.com.  It’s been pretty incredible.  I went back and re-read some of the emails we’ve exchanged over the last year and realized it’s still hard to believe this is real.  We grew up accepting not having him in our lives because it was all we had ever known.  I think this may have made it easier to deal with most of the time.  Yes, there were times his absence was painful and times when I attempted to use it in my teenage rebellion as a bargaining tool, e.g., “Let me do what I want or I’ll find my father and go live with him.”  Being that we didn’t have Ancestry.com back in 1995, this was pretty much an empty and useless threat.

 

            I think for all of us, at some point, we will realize how much we did miss out on and it does create sadness.  My baby sister (still weird to say) posted on Facebook about celebrating her wedding anniversary.  It hit me that I missed her wedding.  I wasn’t a bridesmaid, I didn’t get to toast her and her husband, or get a chance to catch her bouquet.  The same goes for my older sister.  I’ve missed the births of nieces and nephews.  Janelle and I never got to meet our paternal grandparents.  Everything that we missed in their lives that we’ll never get back makes me melancholy.  I know I can’t change the past, so I just have to hope that circumstances will someday allow us to all get together and look at wedding albums and birth pictures.  For all of us to someday have the chance to sit around that huge outdoor table built for holiday dinners and hear the stories of my republican dad and democrat grandfather duking it out over politics and to learn the life stories of that side of our family and for them to learn ours.

 

            We were able to start this journey in December when our dad, Jocie, and I flew to Las Vegas, where Janelle lives, and finally met each other.  Janelle had to work that day and meeting him for the first time was something we not only wanted, but needed to do together.  We’re twins.  For us, that explains it all.  We were meeting at Grimaldi’s and felt a little awkward making our dad wait to meet us until the evening, but I guess we’d all waited 33 years for this meeting, what were a few more hours?  Janelle, Jocie, and I got there first and got a table.  Janelle sat facing the door and every time she rose up in her seat a little, I’d turn around.  Too many false alarms, until she said, “That’s him” and we all turned around to look.  We got up to meet him and he

took all three of us into a big hug.  It was pretty emotional to hug my dad for the first time.  I tend to be rather guarded and don’t really cry, but there was a lot of emotion to process in the moment.

 

            We all sat down and ordered a pizza.  We learned right off the bat that Pepsi is not the same as Coke for him.  (Pepsi’s better!)  I think we then overwhelmed him with pictures from our childhood and how stinking cute we were.  It’s pretty hard to catch someone up on your life before the pizza comes.  I will say that, even with the many emotions swirling around us, I did have to stop and give a shout out to that pizza.  It’s good!  We finished eating our pizza and Janelle and I couldn’t help but make dwarf references about the bikers that were at a nearby table (yes, they looked like Gimli and his fellows at the council at Rivendell and I believe that there was a reference about dwarf women having beards),  so we think our dad may have thought we were nuts.  He should get used to that!  We then stood outside under the heat lamp and kept talking for quite a while.  It was pretty amazing!

 

            We spent the next three days together, seeing some sites and filling each other in on the events in our lives.  I should warn you that, if you ever go to Las Vegas, you can probably skip the Natural History Museum.  We went with our dad because I’d read they had a shark tank.  They do, but it’s very small with teeny, tiny sharks and a few small rays.  It was a kind of cool, but definitely not up to par with other natural history museums.  We should have gone to the big shark tank on the Strip!

 

            For as short as the trip had to be, it was pretty amazing.  I got to spend more time with him than Janelle did, because she had to work, but all in all, it was a pretty amazing trip.  That’s a check off the bucket list: we met our dad and we decided to keep him!