Recently, I traveled home for an early Thanksgiving. There’s nothing like that feeling when I get almost through North Carolina and see the hills and mountains ahead of me. I always get excited because home feels close. This time of year the colors in the trees are gorgeous. It was extraordinarily gorgeous on the drive back, when the orange and red trees were topped with fresh snow in the mountains… but I’m getting ahead of myself.

It was the Winter 2019 Tour. The past few years, I’ve been traveling with my mom to visit relatives; we’ve been to Chicago a couple of times, Colorado, and Wisconsin. I keep asking when she’s coming to Florida to visit me, but so far no dice. I have no young children here so the chances of her coming are slim to none. So I drove up to West Virginia to have an early Thanksgiving with family, then mom and I went on to Chicago with my daughter in tow to visit family.

I’ve always loved Chicago visits. There’s an abundance of food and drink. People give you things whether you need them or not… sausage, clothes, dishes, bread. My cousin once joked, “Do you like that? If you tell my mom you like it, she’ll give it to you.” (Chicago family, you know who I’m talking about.) There’s always laughter and the sharing of our common dysfunctional traits that only cousins can understand. As children we played together. As adults, we cocktail together and talk about the good old days when we were all younger. We talk about our parents and when they were younger.

Most of my cousins in and around Chicago grew up near one another, and then there were the West Virginia cousins, us. As kids we got questions like, “Do you have malls?” “What do you do for fun there, is there any place to go?” Those and similar questions were usually answered with sarcasm – “No, we live in caves and by the way, what is this television you speak of?” The questions were asked innocently though, by other children with no knowledge of the place we lived. To my cousins reading this, I won’t call any of you out, don’t worry. There was a sense of excitement visiting the city and seeing all the latest things and happenings, and it could also be intimidating sometimes. I watched my mom struggle with the variances between her life and theirs.

Something odd happened this visit though; my mom became the one to take charge. It was refreshing to see her in action, I hadn’t seen her so confident in a long time. She was in her element. She spoke up for herself, she made sure we got things done, and she went into full Babcia mode. It was mostly good, and then not as much. The infamous phone call, with all of us sitting around the table, started out nicely. It ended with, “Well I didn’t go see (nameless relative) either and then she was gone”, to which most gasped and I put a hand to my forehead and shook my head with my eyes closed. My cousin had given her a bottle of Holy water to take home and at one point I overheard my aunt’s Polish caretaker talking to my mom about how the water is used in exorcisms. I thought to myself, “I wonder if it’d do any good?” She was upset about not seeing everyone without realizing how the comment came out. She caught herself and softened afterward, but this goes back to my earlier post… don’t cross the Babcia.

Not even if you have Holy water.