The Next Twenty Years

I celebrated my grandmother's 80th birthday in Bodega Bay with my family this weekend.  It was a surprise party, much like the party that we threw for her twenty years earlier, for her 60th birthday.  My family, and my mom in particular, gets a big kick out of surprising my grandma.

As we ended last night watching family videos of a beach house that we rented two decades ago, I reflected on life, time, and family.  We all know that time goes by too quickly, but gathered in a house perched over the ocean, there was a comforting sense of repetition, that we can still have the past in the present, if we remember to try.

I look forward to many more new memories with my family smushed together in beach houses, and, if fortune is on our side, another "surprise" party for my grandmother's 100th birthday twenty years from now!

There is something magical about Polaroids, like they instantaneously validate the present as classic memories.  Thanks Nick for taking these, (and letting me steal them while you napped!).