I’m a do-everything-the-same-don’t-like-change-so-much kind of person. But at the same time I’m a whee!-let’s-take-an-adventure-day kind of person. Once upon a time we lived in a small town and made connections and had friends and did the same things each year. I liked it. It was comfortable. And then we moved. I like moving. It’s new beginnings, fun changes, adventure everywhere you look. But it’s hard to keep things the same and yet make changes. I remember a couple of Christmases ago reading about different families’ traditions and feeling sad. That we didn’t have any. That we just did whatever. I wanted something the same. Slowly, I’ve realized we do have traditions. Like feeding the ducks. We go every spring and fall when the weather allows. We save our old bread scraps (freezing them if need be) and dump them into our picnic basket. We unload and watch as the ducks and geese surround us. This time we even discovered that if you throw bread in the water you can feed the turtles too.
Though we haven’t made the connections close to home that I would’ve liked and I look forward to the next moving adventure some day some things do stay the same. We feed ducks. We go to small town parades. We play soccer in the fall (when we’re not having autumn babies, of course!) We have Not Back To School Days year after year. We play with the neighbor kids in the late afternoons. We cut the kids’ hair on the front porch. We look for Daddy after the school bus passes each day. Though we are not a structured family, we have comfortable routines, that ebb and flow with the seasons. And I like that.
