A Sprouting Tree

For the second time in three years -- and the first time as a married couple -- John and I were not able to celebrate Easter together. This is always a tough holiday to be apart, the most important holiday of the year and the one where our couples fashion style (what little we have) can shine. Easter is also a time to celebrate life and take joy in what gifts we have been given.

So it is fitting that this Easter weekend was one that evoked much thought on the concept of my family life: past, present and future.

This four-day weekend was the first time in years that all three Noblett children resided at 53 Magnolia Circle. In many ways it evoked old times: playing card games and trivia till I got sick of losing, playing taxi cab and delivery service, speaking in shortened verse with references to Disney movies and bodily fluids, and making sport out of my mother's idiosyncracies. Yet it was apparent that times had changed.

For one, I camped out in the spare bedroom/den to avoid the war zone that was my former bedroom. It was my one place that I could crawl into when normal goings on got under my skin. My brother bopped in and out of the house more than I did, also something out of the ordinary. But the biggest difference in this weekend compared to past Noblett family functions was not physical. It was emotional.

When I first walked through that green door, I knew I was home in my head. Yet in my mind and heart, it didn't quite feel right. I never was completely relaxed when I sat on the couch, and the sound of the sump pump turning on and off in the middle of the night jostled my sleep -- despite having lived with police sirens and honking horns outside my window in Boston. I loved spending time with my family, but I had the sense (and I believe it was mutual among my family) that we'd be just fine going back to our own homes at the end of the weekend.

This weekend was the first time I distinctly identified myself as having branched off from my family tree. Living in Boston, from college to that liminal time between getting married and John leaving for Long Island, always had the feeling of summer camp (all 5+ years of it): fun to be away but nice to return to the creature comforts of home. Now home is in Valley Stream, if only temporarily in the physical sense. Home is with John and our crazy adventures to Costco and the Catskills.

The paradigm of marriage has finally set in.

Easter was also a chance to peer into the family of the future. John's oldest sister broke the news of her pregnancy, the first of a new generation in the Thompson clan. My in-laws, of course, are over the moon and I could even hear a bit of excitement in John's voice in being the Funny Uncle. While I didn't see and leafy trees while I was home, the news was like seeing the first bud of spring -- the promise of new life sprouting.

God willing, no new branches will be sprouting from my family tree for some time. Yet the holiday was a perfect reminder that home and family, like life, is both ever changing and everlasting.