Three beautiful things from the past week:

1. Our family has birthdays in spurts. July has already held my dad’s sister’s and father’s birthdays; his middle brother’s birthday is toward the end of the month. Because my grandfather and my Aunt Carrie are no longer with us, my dad sends out memories to the rest of the family via email. These missives always set me off a little bit, but generally the tears are good ones for memories of big family gatherings when I was a kid. My Aunt Dort just sent an email sharing some of her memories of Grampa, too, which is particularly nice because I didn’t know him as well as I’d have liked.

2. Dad’s email last weekend about my Aunt Carrie made me think back to some of my memories of her. The year I got out of college I wanted to make cookies for my dad, but my grandmother had died too early for her to teach me how to make Gramma Cookies, so Aunt Carrie provided me with the secret recipe. Aunt Carrie is also the one who could always be counted on to send me a Valentine’s Day birthday card, even well into my college years, sometimes with a little extra something tucked in to help me celebrate. And the last few years, when she was sick, she was always excited to talk with me about yoga. She particularly liked the tree pose, saying she could just feel roots growing from her foot into the earth when she did it. She was like that with the family — offering us great stability and serving as a grounding force over the years.

3. My dad and Dort both wrote about my grandfather’s love of television and maybe that’s one of the most consistent memories I have of him. We’d go over to visit once a week and while Mum and Dad and Gramma sat in the kitchen and talked, Josh and I would go into the living room and watch tv with Grampa, who let us watch all sorts of things on cable that probably no one else would have let us watch back in the day. We saw some baseball, but we loved music videos and Grampa would let us put on VH1 and just let the music play. We also watched tv shows that would have been off-limits at home, like Hawaii Five-Oh or movies. I particularly remember watching the entirety of Starman in their Ansonia living room.