Spreading my Parent's Ashes...

This summer we decided to join my siblings and their families for a trip to all the places where I grew up.

Today, we visited Rudy's (seafood joint on the lake) and Bev's (ice cream place where we took in so many sunsets) which stirred up so many memories and moments.  Life is about moments that turn into memories, and as I sat there letting my mind work like a search engine retrieving data, categorizing what had been catalogued, I thought about how the moment I was in would be a memory for my children as they construct their own stories by drawing from their backstories.  

We drove down to 45 W. Van Buren where I spent the first 10 years of my life.  It is now a little blue house in the slums literally 4 ft. away from the house on the right and left of it.  It loomed large back when I was a child, but it truly was so puny and run down, dropped squarely in a poor district of the city of Oswego.  The lawn we played baseball on was a small swath, not the major league diamond of my dreams.  The front lawn was literally a 8' by 10' rectangle I remember my dad mowing.  We picked worms on this lawn to make money.  We shoveled snow on this lawn to build snow forts.  We parked our car on this lawn to pack it for trips to see my grandparents.  So huge in my head, so tiny in reality.

That's kinda how so much of life really is.

We stopped to visit Ontario Orchards where I got my first job.  I started picking drops for apple cider, worked my way to the fields of vegetables, and eventually was called up (out of the farm league system as it were) to the farm stand where they sold everything from produce to baked goods, shrubs to peat moss, top soil to mulch, annuals to perennials.  I started selling all manner of flora in the landscaping nursery and eventually worked my way up to designing and installs.  I was learning life and leadership without knowing it.  So much of my work ethic comes from Dennis, my boss.  He was a risk-taker, a team-builder, and a people-person.  I watched what he did and how he did it.  I wanted to be like that regardless of what my occupation was going to be.  Success leaves clues and I was picking them up during my adolescence on the reg (as the kids say these days).

We hit up the house we moved to when I was 10 years old on 319 Tug Hill Rd. and the people that moved in after my mom and dad left 6 years ago let us wander the property and even to come in house.  That was a gift beyond comprehension!  We picked blueberries together as a family and then gathered under a tree my dad and I planted 35 years ago to talk about memories as a family.  After we told stories and let our kids tell stories, we spread their ashes in the garden, a place that spoke of how special and simple my parents were, honoring how they raised us.  So much flooded back into my heart as we wandered the land where I was nurtured and nourished.  This is the place that made me who I am.

We are heading down to where my dad was raised in the Catskill Mountains next to luxuriate in the agrarian landscape, bucolic as it is idyllic.  Can't wait.