The House In Brookline

My daughter sent me a photo an old high school chum had taken of the house we lived in back in the late sixties early seventies in Brookline.  What was dramatically different was that the linden trees which I had planted along the sidewalk shortly after we moved in had grown to their full splendor and the house was somewhat hidden in the leafy greenery of springtime.  It is a noble house generously proportioned and we all lived there quite comfortably for about a decade.  Of course the photo generated so many memories.  The house had a large kitchen in the center of which we had an old fashioned farm table at which eight or more could easily sit.  It was our ground floor gathering place from which the servants staircase went up to the bedrooms and down to the laundry.  Our children were the modern servants; since early on they had learned to take on the responsibility of laundry and kitchen wash-up.  My wife and I did the cooking.  What I was remembering today was the fun and laughter filling the kitchen.  My children are exceptionally witty and back in the day they were trying out their verbal styles, all of them delightfully idiosyncratic.  As a family we laughed a lot.  We had constant company, and they laughed a lot as well.  I have to say that my wife was a little bit glum, at least to my taste which runs to flamboyant, loud, and vulgar.  I remember one of the last really great family get togethers by which time she had died several years earlier, so it was even louder and more hysterical than ever.  The boys were scheduled to drive a truck load of stuff to Richard's and my new condo in Sarasota and we would follow in the car.  The girls joined us the night before in Cambridge and we had dinner near the apartment (the house had long since been sold).  Oh, such merriment! How the four of them--by this time well into their forties I should imagine--carried on with so many risible memories!  We have all survived the divorce and the death, the teenaged complaints of damaged childhoods and parental criticisms, my intense guilt for having been a bad father, even though some part of my brain knows that wasn't true, even if another part says that yes it was.  I have only warm memories of those years, encapsulated in the beautiful house with its magnificent lindens.  And what was so thrilling was they are now moving into middle age just as delightful as when we were all at the kitchen table together.  Recently I journeyed up to New Hampshire to be present as my minister daughter conducted a Trinity Sunday service and afterward her sister and I and her husband had a delightful Sunday dinner.  How nice to enjoy one's children as one enters his dotage.   I dimly remember when some of them came down to assist Richard when I had my surgery, the same kindness and fun.  They are so beautiful,  Richard and I are so beautiful, the old house in Brookline is so beautiful.  The linden trees are magnificent.