My sister Ann Marie turned ninety years old in May. Her birthday celebration, originally scheduled in January for late June, was cancelled due the coronavirus pandemic as well as was everything else in the world we’ve come to take for granted, so family and friends got together using Zoom instead and wished Ann a virtual happy birthday that way.
Still, I had to comb my hair and beard for that one. My wife encouraged me to put on a nicer shirt. I think that’s the day too she ridiculed my comfortable pants selection, saying something in the order of the plaids not matching or something. Really? Who would see me? Oh yeah, her.
I haven’t been down to Iowa since our sister Ginger’s funeral in Des Moines, four years ago. Ginger was two years younger than Ann. Funerals, however untimely, are family reunions of a type that a person strives to attend; strangely birthdays, not so much, until a person gets into the higher numbers and time seems of essence. Determined as we were to go to Ann's birthday party no matter what, the party is cancelled by unseen circumstances. Who would've thought?
I still have a smattering of family in Iowa, on my dad’s side, but Iowa isn’t in our normal trajectory anymore now that my daughter and her family (yeah, I’m a grandfather again) and Jackie’s family all live north of the state line in Minnesota and Wisconsin. I’ve intended to make the trip, to see Ann Marie and Clair, but managing just to ‘do it’ has been my problem as of late, and certainly this year when the threat of Covid-19 colluded with procrastination to become everybody’s problem.
Ann’s family cancelled the surprise in-home party for a drive-by celebration during which Ann, her husband Clair, and a couple of their adult children, gathered in their well-swept anytime-of-the-year two-car garage with the overhead doors open, and waved and talked to local individuals who made the trip to their farmstead a few miles outside of Dallas Center. Later in the day was when we-who-lived-far-away Zoomed up there ourselves from Louisiana; Texas; Colorado; Massachusetts; Florida; and Minnesota.
Ann Marie is twenty-one years older than I am. Until I moved to Minnesota from Iowa in 1979, we’d visit infrequently between their busy times on the farm and my busy times at work. Ann and Clair were involved a great deal in community and family activities; and enjoyed traveling a lot too after they both retired. Although well into his eighties, Clair seems only semi-retired today as he still helps his son during spring planting and harvest.
Ann doesn’t just sit at home and rock on her porch all day either. Until a few short years ago, she was driving twenty miles to Des Moines to swim a couple mornings a week at the YMCA. In between times, she took care of their farmhouse, her husband, a large garden, and would occasionally babysit a grandchild or two; and these later days, great-grandchildren.
Writing this, I realize I don’t thoroughly know my sister, and what I do know are things primarily from my early childhood years until I moved to Minnesota. Family members who move away, like I and Jackie did, respectively, drift apart from their siblings, their lives spinning off and away from others to start their own families sometimes never to reconnect or to be as close as they once were. Thanks to technology though, if we try,we can maintain a semblance of connection in more ways than one.
Reverting to an old method of communication, whereas an image is worth a thousand words, I paged through an old family album and using our large format printer, and began sending Ann a series of cards to commemorate her birthday one day at a time, each one representing a little bit of her life, combined with a little bit of our family history, and each one a little mystery too. Here are a few samples of what I sent:
Ann said she remembered that the above photo with our paternal grandparents, was taken in 1932 after Mom and Dad moved there from Illinois. She said they were in Des Moines outside the Mercy Hospital Nun's Home, where she thought Grandpa Reynolds worked in the maintenance department.
Birthdays at 90. Deaths at 71 or 68. Childhood between about 1930 and 1940. A Minnesotan for 41 years. Drive-by celebrations. Pandemic parties. Zoom
ReplyDeleteSwimming. Rockin’ on the ol’ porch. Is that the chair kind, or as in “rock it out, baby!”
You cover a lot of territory, man, in one of your shortest posts. Great!
Then there was “. . . never to reconnect or to be as close as they once were. Thanks to technology though, if we try, we can maintain a semblance of connection.” That said, there’s something in a hug as opposed to a hand wave, and especially a screen, that just doesn’t cut it.
“Reverting to an old method of communication – pictures,” you say? It’s possible to go back many more centuries to that most intimate of non-touch communication methods: the letter, handwritten, personal, just-for-me, can’t be beat, really old-fashioned letter-writing. During this strange, isolated, and sometimes lonely time, I have taken up the art with a few of my closest correspondents. Way cool!