It brings sudden tears to hear that we have now lost 500,000 people to COVID-19, more than both World Wars and the Vietnam War combined. In one year. I think of my own family–how I would feel if one of them died from this monster virus? Devastated. When considering today’s post topic, all I could think of was home. Where my heart is, family. I am listening to Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings”; it was played at my wonderful mother’s funeral in 2001. I’m glad she and several others missed this pandemic…they had lived through the influenza and/or polio pandemics. If you find and play Barber’s tender, gorgeous masterpiece, perhaps play it in remembrance of those lost this past year or whomever you love who is gone.

Below, some of my family, most still with me, gratefully, but many passed on. Life…so full of events and people –and so fleeting. I am grateful for all the pictures I take and keep.

In the first group from l. to r.: my oldest sister and my brother-in-law; my oldest brother playing flute–all now deceased; my youngest daughter and me; son with his son and a niece; my only surviving brother and sister-in-law.

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Next, l.to r.: My only surviving sister, who has dementia; my husband; group shot of two daughters, a son-in-law and me; oldest and youngest daughters; son and me.

L. to r.: much older shot of a granddaughter with Wolfie; an old shot of another granddaughter as well as of two grandchildren, running; my big sister and my oldest daughter; son and daughter-in-law at their 2019 wedding. .

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L. to r.: Marc, husband, with twin granddaughters; a daughter walking towards camera & another with back turned (we have 4 & 1 son); two daughter and myself during one East coast visit.

Thank you for indulging me. I have a tremendous number of printed and digital photos, as one might expect at 70. I write about my family at times, but today felt the need to go back in time and see them–face-to-face contacts are so much fewer anymore, as we know. All people have families of various sorts. You surely love them; I hope you tell them often, too, as we do to one another. Families are complicated because human beings are so amazingly complex…but oh, how they matter.