Before my brother was born (I was 3-1/2 when he was born), my parents and I took what we called The Long Trip. We took lots of trips when I was a kid but usually we went south to megalopolis to visit my Detroit grandparents and various aunts, uncles, and cousins (Ann Arbor, Royal Oak, and Lansing). It took a day to get there and we stayed with our relatives, not in motels.

On this trip we traveled through Cananananada over to Niagara Falls and back and we stayed in motels most of the time. I have a few vague memories of that trip, which I will try to recount tonight since I have nothing much else to talk about today.

Our first night landed us in a motel in North Bay, Ontario, where I was THRILLED to discover that the bathroom fixtures were PINK!!! PINK! Who’da thunk there were pink terlets in the world? Many years later, The Comm and I were reminiscing about The Long Trip and I think she remembered the PINK bathroom but what she REALLY REMEMBERED was the SPIDER! The Comm did NOT LIKE SPIDERS. OH NO, NOT ONE LITTLE BIT!

We visited what the finFam called “The Hallidays” in Toronto (pronounced like “holiday”). These sisters were genteel older ladies who had never married. I would have to look up exactly how they are related to me. I believe they were more closely related (great-aunts?) to a Canadian third cousin I connected with a couple years ago and she remembers them much more clearly. Me? I sorta remember being served tea in a parlor or whatever. I’m sure my tea was heavily laced with milk and sugar.

I vaguely remember Niagara Falls. I don’t really remember being at the Sherman house (in a town on the American side of the falls) but The Comm has told me that when we arrived at the Sherman’s, I took one look, yelled KIDS (they had three at that time), and basically disappeared. That doesn’t exactly sound like Shy-Me but I’ll take it. A few years later, the Shermans (with five kids by that time) started visiting us at the moomincabin in the summers and one summer, Danny and I had a bit of a thing going (we were six) and we re-enacted umpteen bazillion times (at his direction) a little scene where we got “married” at Niagara Falls. The last line of the skit was, “Let’s go, honeybunch!” and we would skip along down the beach, holding hands.

And a memory not related to a specific location… We owned a copy of the Golden Songbook (I still have it) and I demanded that The Comm sing the songs over and over and over. The Comm was not really a singer but I liked the music and I was entranced by the musical notations and the fact that the staffs were often colored in with yellow or pink or blue or whatever. The musical notations stayed with me although I don’t need colored musical staffs any more. Eventually I learned how to decode that language on my own.

Oh, what the heck? We didn’t doooo anything today? We drove across town to meet our most recent great-nephew, born a couple weeks ago. The GG held him for a while. He wasn’t totally happy. I refrained from holding him. I am not a “baby person”. I love babies. They are all miracles and this young man is gorgeous (like they all are). But unless a young parent needs to be spelled for a bit I doubt that the baby wants meeeee to hold them. So I sat and talked to the baby’s grandma (my beloved sister-in-law) and the baby’s wonderful erudite father and watched the baby’s big sis play with her new Paw Patrol toys. 🧡

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