Meet the Jones Family and More!

David's American family comes from New England. For the last three summers, I have had the privilege of joining David on his annual migration northwards from Washington DC -- through central Massachusetts to visit to the Jones family, through Boston neighborhoods to visit aunts and uncles who still inhabit houses built by the family, eventually straight through to Mount Desert Island in Maine, where David likes to spend a couple of weeks at his Uncle Frank's house in Southwest Harbor. There we relish time with his Aunt Sue, who still resides year round there. We enjoy lobster, hiking, blueberries, boating and general relaxation. That WAS the plan. We were going on vacation. Well, you all know what happened to that plan.

This weekend we took our vacation with the Jones'. It was everything we could have wished for, only two weeks too short. Tim and Judith live in the countryside in the forest. A part of the country where people still don't lock their doors. Pumpkin patches abound this time of year. Tim is building a house -- has been for about five or six years now. Everything from scratch -- his inventions, his designs, his dreams. We don't expect it to be finished for another couple of years -- all the better to tease him. Judith and Susannah have horses in the back yard and Susannah is starting to compete. Mary Louisa, the energizer bunny, rides bareback with her big sister, plays the piano and keeps us all laughing. Lying in bed in the morning I could hear the whole family laughing around the breakfast table. They light candles at breakfast and all sit at the table -- it is so nice.

We arrived Friday night and had some time around the table to talk before going to bed. On Saturday we went on the road visiting aunts and uncles. One lovely part that day which will remain unrecorded in photos (because we were so relaxed) was a quiet hour at Uncle Paul's house in Norwell on the North River. Uncle Paul was driving Aunt Rosina to Cape Cod but offered us the house should we care for a rest. We brought some lunch over, ate at his picnic table overlooking the river and then went down to his little dock and laid on our backs, bobbed up and down, listened to birds and practically fell asleep. That lasted about 15 minutes before we realized we had to go -- but it was a slice of heaven.

Saturday night was hair trauma so Sunday needed to be good. And it was. We set out with Judith and girls to see progress on the house and see Susannah and Mary Louisa ride together. We had lunch at a little breakfast diner (um, David and Mary Louisa took dessert seriously), we visited the East Quabbin Land Trust for which Judith is on the board and walked on some of the fields and old walls they have saved. Overall, it was a simply a mellow, quiet, peaceful, restful day. Judith prepared a wonderful dinner of smoked salmon and beefy tomatoes and we all went to bed happy. In the morning, it was suddenly time to go -- the girls to school and David and I back to NYC for my 11:30 radiation appointment. We just made it, leaving New Braintree at about 7:45 AM. Not bad. Mary Louisa gave me a purple fleece hat for my bald head. Susannah made a small bedouin doll riding the back of a donkey. Wonderful memories of the warm, happy home that they open to us every summer. And, as you can surmise, that home was especially meaningful to us this summer, as were the greetings and sentiments that we got from David's entire family over the course of the weekend.