So I spent a couple days visiting with my family this week, which prevented me from reading, writing, reviewing, and outlining my flash fiction. This is why I’m late, but hey it’s done! It happened to work out pretty well that I could pull from that trip and still include all the words with minimal bending of actual events. Here’s a glimpse into my life…
*****
I’m twenty-five years old, coming up to my next birthday, and I’m married to my high school sweetheart. I live only an hour away from pretty much my entire family, so I try to make a trip up to see them about once a month. This gets messy though, because like every other person on the planet, they have busy lives and scheduling time to see everyone for more than a few minutes each can be nerve racking.
I love my family, but we can often be a very text book definition of dysfunctional. Sometimes though, spending time with them, particularly when it’s quality individual time separately, can be that comfortable experience you expect when around loved ones that are supposed to love and accept you no matter what.
My mother is naturally the focus of my visits, and as an only child, there is no escaping that daughterly duty to spend time with her. All her attention and affection funnels down to me, so I end up coddled every time I’m at her house. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it’s kind of nice, not having to worry about if it’s my turn to cook! It can just be a little suffocating at times.
However, my latest trip was actually pretty laid back and low key. I saw everybody for a good few hours each and there were no arguments, no interventions, just talking and hanging out. One of my better visits, I must say!
My time with my mom was probably the funniest. My mom taught me to play cards when I was young, but my husband and friends don’t play with me…because I always win. I have now gotten to the point where I always win against my mom too, but at least she still plays with me. So that’s our thing, we play cards.
We’ll turn the TV on, generally to something we don’t have to pay close attention to, and we play. We’ve had games of Rummy that have gone into the thousands in points. So that’s exactly what we did.
We flipped through the channels to see if there were any movies on that we liked that would be good background noise, but mostly just passed some weird stuff, including something with a monkey eating an apple. Whatever. We ended up just turning on cartoons. Yes, cartoons!
I actually loved this, because it’s not like I watch cartoons much these days. There were a couple episodes of Scooby-Doo, one of which was the zodiac one where they talk about constellations and stuff, but the other was a more typical one, where a seeweedy monster was coming out of the blue lagoon or black lagoon or whatever. Scooby used to be one of my faves growing up.
The rest of the day was spent on looney tunes. We saw Bugs tickle Elmer Fudd, he produced many a limerick, there was an episode with a cherub fluttering about, he outsmarted Marvin the Martian, and it was just a surprisingly fun day.
The best part might have been the cards though. I beat my mom at Rummy by nearly a thousand points, so we switched to a game I’d learned recently called Castle. A friend showed it to me recently and the best part about it is that it’s based more on luck than strategy, so I can’t ALWAYS win…my husband still won’t play it with me though *sigh*.