Leaving tomorrow to go see my family up in Wisconsin for the first time in... I think 6 years. Grandmother had a bit of a health crisis this year, and for the last couple weeks, we thought this would be the last time we would see her. Thankfully, I just found out yesterday that was a bit of a false alarm, and she'll be leaving the hospital soon. Haven't seen her in 3 years.
My mom has a huge family up there, and they used to be very close knit. But that's been breaking up over the last several years, because it was the elders of the family that held it all together. My mom's parents and two sets of great grandparents. They all died out in a pretty short time span several years back, except for my grandmother. The gigantic gatherings of several dozen people died out with them. (For real - it was like half the city was in on it when one set of great grandparents celebrated their 75th anniversary)
But this year everyone's making a big push to have one last large family gathering for Christmas. I'm told there's going to be one of those white elephant things, so I wanted to show off my contribution to that.
All my family up there come from farming backgrounds, and are avid hunters. Duck hunting especially. My uncles have duck hunting stuff and paintings of flocks of ducks taking flight plastered all over their homes. When I was like 2 or 3 years old, I witnessed them coming home from a hunting trip once and unloading all the dead ducks. I said "Quack quack! I'm a duck! Please don't kill me!" and then ran away crying. I was known as "Chuck the Duck" by my family up there all the way up into my mid-teens. I've heard the story a million times. We would visit 2-3 times a year all through my childhood (it's a 6-7 hour drive for us), and I would often bring my NES and play Duck Hunt. There wasn't much else for me to do up there.
I'm broke and busy as fuck, and had to come up with something quick and zero cost tonight. I'm quite pleased I think I came up with something they'll get a good kick out of, under the circumstances. It'll fit right in with their collections of homey naturalist paintings, right?
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Topic: Bay12 Photo Share! Let's share photos and cool things. (Read 1666476 times)