Cousins

For as many summers as my children can remember, their California cousins have flown east from their suburban home across the country to the relative wilds of northern New England. The arrival of the California cousins – or the Tennessee cousins or the Texas cousins – is an eagerly anticipated event, one the kids talk about for weeks beforehand.

NH & TN cousins, many years ago

My mother, who is an only child, often says she doesn’t fully grasp the relationship between siblings, even after having raised three of them. I feel the same way about cousins. Considering both my parents come from Irish-Catholic families (and each has dozens of cousins), it seems incredible that I only have three first cousins.

I love my cousins dearly, but I’m stuck age-wise between them and their kids. We had regular family gatherings when I was growing up, but the age gap meant we weren’t running around together playing capture the flag or giggling like crazy over nothing much, which is what my kids spent much of the middle of July doing.

This year we met the California crew on Cape Cod – two families with kids ranging in age from 9 to 16 years, a pair of grandparents, and another aunt and uncle thrown into the mix – for a week of beach time. We returned home to New Hampshire to find my husband’s Texas cousins and their kids visiting, which meant a happy continuation of cousin fun.

The cousin bond is special – not quite sibling, but different than friend. Maybe it is the novelty of only seeing each other once a year (or less often), or a sense of familial loyalty, or that they share some of the same stories. Whatever the reasons, the kids fall into the relationship each visit as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.

In past years, when the California cousins are on the East Coast, the kids have established a regular list of things to do – hiking Bald Knob, kayaking Long Pond and looking for crayfish and salamanders, toasting marshmallows at the backyard firepit and watching fireflies flit through the summer night.

This year, we got to introduce the California crew to some of our favorite haunts on Cape Cod, where we’ve gone for a week each of the past eight summers. We visited old favorite beaches and explored new ones. We played mini golf in one of our regular (and not so busy) places and checked out a new course down the road from where we were staying.

We got ice cream at the same place my family did when my brothers and I were children and watched the kids run around on the beach we played on when we were little. We even found a new candy store to substitute for the annual cousins visit to Chutters.

From our rental house at the Cape, the kids could tramp down to the beach whenever they felt like it. They usually paired up – one New Hampshire kid, one California kid – in a revolving mix of personalities and activities. My kids look up to their older cousins, all teenagers now, and the older kids seem to appreciate the chance to do kid stuff for a week with a slightly younger crew – and no other teenagers to impress.

The timing of this year’s cousin visits from various corners of the country meant that bidding a melancholy adieu to the California crew was quickly followed by happy anticipation of hanging with the Texas contingent. Before we’d even walked through the door back home, the kids were clamoring to see their Texas cousins, who have visited the past few years.

Forget recovering from vacation, we jumped back in to communal dinners with 20 people – including 10 kids ranging from baby to 13 years old. There were impromptu soccer matches and rounds of hide-and-seek and other made up games. The kids piled into the pickup truck to drive through the field and visit the neighboring cows. There was plenty of general goofing around.

With all the kids growing older, I’m not sure how many more years of week-long summer visits we’ll have. But I know my kids will remember fondly these wild weeks of cousin fun well beyond childhood. 

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 27, 2018 issue of the Littleton Record.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

“You know everybody, Aunt Meghan,” my niece told me soon after my brother’s family arrived in town early this month, traveling from Californian suburbia to the relative wilds of northern New England.

I certainly don’t know everyone around here, but small town living generally includes a considerable awareness of who your neighbors are – and where they are and what they are doing and with whom. If you’re looking for anonymity, this is probably not the place for you. But small towns are pretty good at taking care of their own.

As I drove around with a car full of California and New Hampshire kids, my own children and I remarked that so-and-so’s car was at the post office, we waved to friends, we stopped along backroads near home to greet a neighbor now and then. For the California kids, who live in a place with a steady stream of strangers flowing past, I guess that aspect of small town-ness seemed quaintly odd.

I have lived most of my adult life where everybody – or a relatively large percentage of folks I come into contact with, anyway – knows my name, or at least my face. In Crested Butte I moved within various social and work and skiing circles, but there were large areas of overlap among these. Even if everybody didn’t really know everybody else, a general sense of familiarity permeated the scene in this small ski town.

In the village where I lived for a summer on an Irish peninsula, I was known by several names: “the Yank” who worked for the Diamonds, the “horsey woman” (because I was a horse-trekking guide), the American girl who played soccer with the Connemara Coasters. While everybody there didn’t know my name, they all seemed to know who I was and what I was doing. It is hard to hide a newcomer in a small village where people are intricately related, especially a newcomer with a strange accent.

When I first moved back east, I found it disconcerting when strangers would stop me at the grocery store or in the ski lift line or during some social event and remark excitedly that they had known me when I was THIS HIGH. Not having been paying close attention at the age of 6 or 7 and having traversed two decades since then, I would smile politely, usually having no idea who my friendly accoster was.

I’ve been here long enough now that I am rarely approached by unknown, long-ago acquaintances. These people have long since become familiar. But it is still nearly impossible to navigate local errands without some delay from bumping into someone who wants a word – or several.

A quick run into the post office to check the mail can take half an hour. Stopping at the store for a carton of milk on the way home might consume just as long. I’ve even been waylaid on early morning jogs when I run into neighbors and slow down to chat briefly, while trying to catch my breath. You simply learn to expect delays – and how to politely run away when you don’t have the time to be distracted.

The last afternoon the California crew was here, I took the kids down to the river for a pre-dinner swim. I ran into a friend there, the only other person we saw, and had a chat while the kids and dogs were splashing and exploring and looking for interesting rocks.

On the way home, there was what constitutes a traffic jam on the narrow backroad: three cars traveling in close procession toward us, plus a couple of pedestrians and a dog in the road. I yelled a greeting out the window to the first car, which contained summer friends we hadn’t seen yet this season. A bit further along, I greeted neighbors who were out walking the dog. I noted another neighbor outside doing yardwork.

“Yep, you know everyone,” my niece confirmed from the passenger seat, no longer surprised by this phenomenon.

Later that evening, one of those neighbors sent me a text. She’d found a camera on the bridge by the swimming hole and determined from the photos on it that it belonged to one of us. It did, although we hadn’t yet noticed it missing. Personal item returned practically before it’s even lost? That’s just a benefit to living where everybody knows your name.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her blog, Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the July 14, 2017 issue of the Littleton Record. 

Countdown to Summer

The countdown to summer vacation is on at my house, and it is on in earnest. Maybe it is because May slid into June through a near-constant string of sunshine. Or because the California cousins will be here before my New Hampshire kids are even done with the school year. Perhaps it’s that my two 3^rd graders spent several spring days mired in standardized testing, which can cause even the most ardent of students to bemoan school.

Whatever the reason, this year my kids have known exactly how many school days are left at any given time for the past few weeks. We’re almost there. A few more days. And here, on the cusp of summer, the anticipatory promise of all the good things that season should be is nearly overwhelming.

We’ve had an early taste of some of our favorite summer things already. A few years ago it snowed Memorial Day Weekend, and the kids built a snowman beneath the newly unfurled leaves of the maple trees in the front yard. This year, Memorial Day Weekend was a sweltering tease of the approaching season, and we took full advantage, packing a load of pre-summer fun into three little days. We did a quick loop up our favorite short hike, joined a friend posse to cool off at Echo Lake, and took our first dip of the year in the Ham Branch.

Since then we’ve added trips to the tennis court, pedaled through our family’s favorite bike ride, and opened our mini-golf season. We have broken out popsicles and ice cream on the front porch. The lawn has been mowed several times. The fire pit is ready for s’mores and socializing. The garden is in – mostly, anyway – and I can almost taste those first delicious peas, even though they’re still a few weeks away.

And that is, perhaps, the impetus behind the countdown to summer: sweet anticipation of what we know is to come. Afternoons at the pool or the river. Feet in the sand at the beach or the dirt in the garden. Hikes up a few taller mountains, perhaps, or exploring new bike trails through the woods. Impromptu soccer games in the front yard. The rush of cooling air from soaring through back-and-forth arcs on the backyard swings. The twinkling magic of a million fireflies flickering through the field and of a gazillion stars overhead.

With all of these things on the horizon, the two summer events my kids say they’re most looking forward to are The Cousins and The Cape.

The first crew of cousins arrives from California during my kids’ last week of school. There are certain traditions we share with them during each annual visit – a hike up Bald Knob, a paddle around Long Pond, trips to the river my brothers and I cooled off in when we were kids, evenings by a backyard fire. The second set of cousins comes from Tennessee later in the summer, instigating gatherings with the other side of the family – and lots more fun.

The other most-highly anticipated week of the summer is our annual pilgrimage to Cape Cod. This will be the fifth year my children have journeyed from the quiet mountains of home to the crowded beaches of the Cape. During those years we have settled into favorite beaches, ice cream haunts, and mini golf courses. It helps, of course, to have friends who live down the street and are happy to play tour guide for the week we are there, ferrying us to places only the locals know. Each year we find at least one new place to explore.

That trip, though, is still many weeks in the future, many summer experiences down the road. For now, the full promise of summer sits just out of reach. It will be here soon enough. A few more days of reluctant early mornings and the confines of school days. A few more days to cross off the calendar. The countdown is on; summer will be here in 3-2-1.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the June 10, 2016 edition of the Littleton Record.