Make it Dance

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance. 
George Bernard Shaw 

Emma Belle Lafferty Slack, My Mom's paternal Grandma, with me

For Christmas this year, I got the gift of an enormous frame for a collection of family pictures.  I was given it because I am loved, by people who notice that my walls are covered by family pictures stuck on with funtac and that my hand is rarely without a camera in it.

They probably didn't think of the other gift that came with the frame.  The gift of time spent pouring albums out onto tabletops and remembering and defining and deciding who is the family that has to be included in this tribute to those who I love and who love me.

Austin, my oldest son, and Ford his puppy

Greg and I, Do I need to say '80's

Paul & Priscilla, my parents

Mimi & Harvey, my In-laws

Lawrence Slack & Paul Miller
Grandpa & Dad

Harvey & my Boys in the oil patch

1987 right after I went to School in China

My in-law's 50th anniversary 

around 1996

Greg & I as students in China

Being Dad

and being Mom

Brothers

Finally a girl in the family

and more girls

Suddenly the fact that I have Family is amazing to me.  It isn't the family I was born into, and yet it is.  It has gained and lost people, by birth and death but also by choice.  It is filled with love, and always has been.  And I am grateful.

I know when I was born into my family, I soon came to accept that all families were like mine, and mine would always be made up of the people it contained at that time.  In other words, me and my parents and my Grandma Grace and Grandpa Lawrence.

It would have terrified me to consider how many times that "family" would add or lose people, and to think of it as not stable but flexible and dynamic would have felt like dangling over a bottomless dark pit.

 But the more I have watched and lived in this world, the more I see, that my family is connected to your family, and nothing is dark or lonely except our own isolationist sense that we are alone. 

We are not, 

everyone is here together, a family of humanity sharing just one home. 

 The more people I get to know, the more I see to love. Sure, we are not good, or evil, but a blending of my strengths and my weaknesses with the rest of the people here gives us more than enough strength to overcome out problems and solve our issues and celebrate our differences which after-all, are our strengths.