My chick has returned to roost….at least for now!

My youngest, Briana, has returned to the nest to go back to school. She has decided that the health care business is where the future is. I look around TV and can’t fault her logic. We are a population going Grey. We spend more time at the Doctors, than anywhere else lately.

I look around the neighborhood and notice that she is not the only chick back in the coop. RC’s granddaughter is also attending community college for Nursing, three houses to the right another friend has his son camped out on his side porch, and the house four houses to the left also has a kid on a laptop doing homework on the lanai. All of these new Villagers are over 19 of course (refer to our covnent), but the face of this community is changing a bit. This difficult economy has had an unexpected side effect. Families are again extending.

My great-great grandmother had a large house next to the rail road tracks in Tonawanda, NY. It had two apartments upstairs and everyone in the family lived there at one time or another. During the great depression, all of the kids lived there because it was easier to keep them fed and warm under one roof. Grandma cared for all of them while their parents worked at what ever was available while trying to stay out of the poor house. First and second cousins, three and four generations, all under one roof. The stories they all told about living at Grandma Holler’s always made me yearn again for that kind of extended family. They never talked about the hardships, but of the love and fun they shared. They remembered ice skating on Ives pond, and climbing the apple trees. They remembered the hobo’s from the tracks out back, that Grandma would give soup in exchange for work on the fence. Life was measured by how you lived and laughed, not by what you did or had.

My parents generation also found comfort at Grandma’s (now owned by the next generation my great Aunt Margaret). Job losses, illness, death and divorce were some of the reasons we passed through those loving doors. Aunt Margaret welcomed any of us that needed a home, or just an apron covered lap to cry on. We still skated on Ives pond and loved to cross that field to have some of the piping hot chocolate that was always waiting. She’d sit us down and cut our bangs (I have pictures to prove the results of this torture). Colleen, Connie, Susan, Cindy? Sometimes she couldn’t get our names right the first time, but we knew who was getting “hollered at”. She and her sister Rose sold real estate. They dragged us around to the “appointments”, pointing out this house that they could have bought for a song, or that place that went cheep because his wife was running around.

Aunt Margaret died in that house quite a few years ago, and it was sold. I was sad at first that no one in our generation had an interest in the old place, but we were wrapped up in our own lives, and the next thing I knew it was gone.

I have tried to carry on the “open door” tradition in the way our generation has adapted. The first house I bought was a four family that still provides a home for the people I care about. My daughter Erika and nice Stephanie live in the apartments downstairs and I think my nephew Brian is moving in soon. My sister, sister in law, brother in law and a whole flock of friends have lived on “Niagara St.” Later, we made sure our family home had an in-law apartment and when my mother’s health began to fail she moved in and lived there until she died. That apartment became the spring board to independence for my kids, and extended our family to many others during the 20 years we lived there. Our home was the gathering place for all of the neighborhood kids, and where all of the best parties were held.

When we made the difficult decision to sell Tonawanda Creek (the “Ponderosa”) and move to TV, quite a few voices cried foul. They must have felt what I felt when Grandma’s house was sold. The lesson here, however, is that home is wherever the Welcome Mat is. It is not about the bricks and mortar around you but the welcoming arms that bring you into the safe place. I am glad to welcome Briana back to the “safe place”, until she’s ready to fly again.

I know that the circle will eventually come back around. My kids, hopefully have learned to keep their hearts and homes open to those in need, and won’t put me prematurely into a bad smelling nursing home.