Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

Two Sundays ago, cattitude and I went up to Niskayuna, N.Y., for a gathering of his family. [Niskayuna is near Schenectady and Albany, if that helps orient you; if not, it's in the interior of New York State, north and west of where the Mohawk River meets the Hudson.]

Cattitude's sister, Nancy, found a hotel for everyone to stay in, since his parents lack both time and energy to host all their children and grandchildren overnight. All, in this case, is Cattitude's brothers (two) and sister, their respective spouses, and a total of five children, ranging in age from 7 to 16, plus the two of us. Individually, I like almost all of them (to the extent that I know them well enough to like or dislike them; I don't really know the nieces and nephews, in part because they have, of course, changed a lot more since I saw them last than the adults have). Collectively, it was overwhelming.

I can't seem to convince Cattitude's father that it matters that flash photography hurts my eyes. He picked up the camera while standing next to me Sunday evening, I reminded him, and he said something dismissive and aimed the camera at all his grandchildren, seated at the other end of the table, and took a couple of pictures. This is a serious camera, with a very bright flash. It could have been worse, physically, but it wasn't comfortable, for my eyes or my sense of being wanted there. I told Cattitude that night that, if his father was doing similar things tomorrow, I was going to walk away and say "Send Cattitude to let me know when it's safe to return." Fortunately, it didn't come to that. He rounded everyone up for photos in mid-afternoon, on the front lawn. He was taking grandchildren photos with the flash, on some theory about it bringing out faces well (funny, when I was learning what little I know about photography, flashes produced red-eye and squinting), but was willing to turn it off to get a picture of me and Cattitude, and for one or two entire-family photos. Then he said he was going to take more flash photos, but gave me time to walk away and play with the neighbor's very patient cat, who had wandered over and was letting Cattitude's seven-year-old nephew stroke and hold it for quite a while.

Earlier that day, everyone except Cattitude's parents had gotten into an assortment of cars and vans and driven to a state park to sit on the beach reading, swim, and hike. Soon after we arrived, Cattitude's sister-in-law gathered all those who wanted to hike (a trail through the woods around the lake), and then she proceeded to set a pace that I couldn't match. We made a few attempts to shout things like "slow down" and "wait for me" before giving up and letting the rest of the group disappear out of sight.

Walking in the woods with Cattitude is a very good thing, even on a humid day. Being told we're all going to hike together and then abandoned is not, and that dampened my mood, as did the dark suspicion (unfounded) that by the time we got back they'd have eaten all the lunch.

The hike was a bit tricky, partly because the trail was "more difficult" (according to the trail markers, but I don't know what scale they're using) and partly because there'd been something like ten inches of rain in the previous month, making stretches of the trail muddy and difficult. All that rain meant lots of pretty fungus to look at: reds and oranges, bright yellow, shades of white through dark brown of course, and even an odd pale green that looked like something had grown on the fungus, our thought until we spotted a few more of the same shape and color. I also found a gorgeous garter snake, detecting it by its movement off the trail, and a toad. American toads do a very good job of looking like small dead leaves, until they hop. Cattitude spotted two or three, and showed me a frog in the lake. (There was less visible animal life in the lake than I'd expected, and far fewer birds; our local salt marsh is on the Great Eastern Flyway.)

When we'd finished walking around the lake, we found Nancy (Cattitude's sister, whose basic plan was to sit on the beach, read, and talk to the rest of us). She kindly made us sandwiches and handed us bottles of water and chunks of watermelon. And then I went in the water, because it looked friendly and cool. I'm not a good swimmer, but this was a small lake, no waves to worry about. I went in wearing my glasses and sunglasses (it was that bright), so I was mostly just standing, or kneeling, in the cool water. I did attempt a little bit of swimming, which was probably a mistake: that plus the amount of hanging onto trees I'd done in muddy spots on the trail left me with an unhappy right shoulder for a day or two.

One good thing about the trip was that we both got to spend time with Cattitude's younger brother, Peter, and his wife, Trish, who are my favorite of his relatives. We rode with them both to and from the park on Monday. (Their son asked to ride with Nancy so he could be with her son Stephen, who he had attached himself to strongly. Stephen was doing remarkably well both with the adoration of a much-younger and somewhat developmentally disabled cousin, and the general business of keeping said cousin out of trouble.) I also hung out with them in the kitchen while they were cooking Sunday night; I'd ducked in there because I wasn't sure of how to respond to an odd bit of conversation in the living room, and stayed because they were happy to have the company and talk. (Odd, not hostile: a discussion of newspaper subscriptions led to the note that the Schenectady paper doesn't have a "society" page, and then Cattitude's father said that the problem with Schenectady was that there was no "society" in that sense. I had no idea whether he meant this seriously, and didn't quite feel like asking.)

Dinner Monday night was even more crowded, because Cattitude's aunt Judy and uncle Bob had driven over. I talked with his aunt a bit, and she strongly recommended a book about the early Dutch settlement of New York and its effects on American culture, called The Island at the Center of the World, which I'm mentioning here mostly in the hope of remembering to check whether the library has a copy I can borrow.

We were there for two days, less than any of Cattitude's siblings, who seemed to be treating it more as some combination of their-family vacation and taking the children to see their grandparents. I had planned my trip to Montreal before we got the details on the Cattitude family thing, but the two visits fit together remarkably well. Nancy had asked that we make a point of being there Monday, because that was the only day that her husband, Crit, could make it. And then things shifted, delays happened, and he didn't get to the hotel until around midnight Monday. So we saw him for a little while Tuesday morning, at breakfast in the hotel and then hanging out at Cattitude's parents' home until we left. And then I spent too much time in the train station and on the train to Montreal, making me even gladder to see rysmiel and be back in a proper city than I otherwise would have been.

At this point, I'm thinking that I'd far rather see Cattitude's relatives in smaller groups than all at once. But it's likely that someone will arrange another such gathering in a few years, and I'll decide then whether to accompany him.