Lots of writing, but little posting

Since October, I've done a lot of writing.  Some for school, but most of it came as a release after James' murder.  The only thing is I never released most of it since I wanted to go back and edit the posts, which never happened.  So today, I'm combining some of the posts and publishing them.  Maybe in the future I'll go back and edit them and clean them up the way I envisioned when I began writing.
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Over the past two months I have been reflecting on my family and our experiences together.  It's been two months since James was murdered, with the preliminary examination occurring yesterday and surfacing more memories of my family's time together.  Coming from a large and close extended family, there are many memories of my cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandmother growing up.  With about a 15 year age gap between sets of cousins, it's been interesting to see the younger one's reactions when us old-timers tell stories of our youth.

There are certain things that my large, Polish family did together while I was growing up.  Every Sunday was spent at my Grandmother's house and all my cousins were there.  We had a blast playing games together and picking on each other.  Well, maybe we didn't enjoy ALL our time together, but it turned into fond memories by all involved overtime.  Our parents would go on vacation together and my grandmother would watch between 4-6 of us at a time.  Boy, the stories we can tell these days!  But after she passed away and we all began to grow up, our younger cousins missed out on that opportunity.  They think we are crazy when we tell them of the games we played, our sleeping bag races, the hide-n-seek games where we would "forget" to look for someone, our trips to the corner store to buy gum, or the absolutely crazy times we had at the "dirt hills" where we would ride our bikes down a vertical drop with several trees in our way.  The seven of us were best friends and have so many good memories of our times together.

The younger set missed out on that opportunity to play and get into trouble together every weekend.  At the funeral, through emails, and at Christmas dinner, the younger ones have started to ask us to tell more stories about what we did at Grandma's house, what their father was like before he married and had kids, and how we all survived without maiming each other.  (Okay, there might have been a few stitches here and there, but nothing serious!)  The best thing I've learned from all the reminiscing we are beginning to do is we all remember different pieces of our youth.  Even though we've grown apart in both life and geographic location, we remain connected through our memories.  No single one of us can paint a complete picture of our past without the rest of us to help them fill in the void that old age (or conscious effort) leaves.