Write about a few of your favorite family traditions.
Hhhmmm… Family traditions. What are our family traditions? That’s an interesting question, and I’m not 100% certain that I have answers at the ready. But a few ideas come to mind.
Canis familiaris
Let’s start with the beautiful beast snoozing in a sun puddle at my feet about two feet from a crackling fireplace. One of our family tractions involves dogs. Our small family has always included a Labrador retriever. In fact, the day that Susan and I first met each other in the summer of 2008, we were both taking our dogs swimming at the Rock Harbor dock. Griffin I (my first of two Griffins) was my first Labrador retriever, and Tasha was Susan‘s first Labrador retriever. Both dogs were leaping off the end of the dock, chasing balls, swimming to shore, racing back around to the dock, and then leaping off again. Wash, rinse, repeat. This was the first time that Susan and I ever met. The tradition of labs leaping off docks remains a big part of our life together. (See “Canine Companionship”.)
Serial Home Renovation
When Susan and I reconnected in the summer of 2001 she was redoing an apartment in Manhattan, and I was transforming a full floor of a Haussmannien pierre de taille building in Paris’ Faubourg Saint-Germain into Maison Margaux. We’ve been collaborative serial home rehabilitators ever since!
Re-re-rehoming
From rehabbing to rebooting to rehoming, another family tradition is recycling, repurposing, reusing, regifting, and, yes, rehoming. Susan is the most generous human being in the world, so she’s apt to give away virtually anything that family and friends want, need, *might want*, or *might need*. I can’t bear to waste anything. I love the challenges of reimagining utility, extending life cycles, and wabi-sabi. And so we often find ourselves rehoming for pleasure, for practical purposes, and for the the wonders of a well patinaed aesthetic.
Champlaining
Another obvious family tradition revolves around Champlaining. I’ve explained this idea before, but the short version is that our family’s Rosslyn lifestyle is centered on Lake Champlain.
Homegrown
Both Susan and I love to entertain family and friends, and a now well established tradition for is is to draw upon garden-to-table abundance when hosting. At the heart of this tradition is gardening — organic gardening and holistic gardening — supplemented with hyperlocal ingredients from our CSA (Full and By Farm) and a remarkably rich array of local food producers. We often invite our guests to help us harvest from Rosslyn’s garden and orchard. And then we prepare and share a meal together. This is an informal shift for some, but it’s an important family tradition for us.
What About Poetry?
So I opted to morph this post into another “Top 5” post since that’s been working out well the last few days. But, I’d really like to add one more family tradition. So maybe treat this as a bonus? Top five family traditions… plus one!
For Susan and for me poetry is another family tradition, if you can call it that. We both write poetry. We both read poetry. We both gravitate to poetry when other language lacks the tools we need. From the poetics of place and lyric ruminations to haiku (and other micropoetry), we’re a poetry family. So you can consider that the bonus family tradition!
What do you think?