Haibun: Family

Today is Haibun  Monday at dVerse Poets Pub.  “This week, let us consider gratitude: Its essence, those reasons we have for feeling it, and what our lives—and our world—may look like if we live it.”  Frank wants us to write about gratitude.  It isn’t just for American Thanksgiving, but for us all.  Traditionalist that I am, I am ending this with an American Sentence.

 

Family
“The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” Richard Bach

The black and white photo, a Polaroid. One of the first my mother took with her new camera she bought for the heck of it. We all stared in wonder as the picture appeared on the film and she wiped the swab of developer/fixer across it. The photo has lasted for 62 years. It shows us all around the Thanksgiving table – my great-grandfather, my grandmother and grandfather, my father and mother and me, and my two aunts, the younger sisters of my mother. In the center of the table is a huge turkey, a ham, and a big platter of my father’s perfect fried chicken. Bowls of vegetables from the garden canned or frozen, and on the sideboard salads,  a luscious fresh coconut cake, several pies, a pecan pound cake with an orange glaze. The first cake I had ever baked. I was six.
We are sitting around the table smiling at the camera. My mother pressed the remote bulb and there we are, frozen in time. Now the only people left alive in the photo are my two aunts and I. However, I look in the scrapbook at the photo with tears in my eyes and gratitude in my heart. My family. My people, my tribe. How when we went around the table to speak what we were thankful for, we all to a person said, “Family”.

Love surrounds us daily even when family has passed to heaven.