Medicating My Family (Mostly Myself)

When Jon and I planned a trip to visit my family last weekend, I realized it would be different than our first trip. On our first trip last fall, we met my family for a night of camping. They were out of their environment… there was a lot of wide-open space for the kids to release the effects of brownies, cookies and snack cakes… there was a ski boat and a jet ski for distraction… there were only twenty-four hours. This time… this time was going to be different. We would be at home- five adults and four children in a three-bedroom house. It would be cold… and raining… and twice as long as our first trip.

On Saturday, we drove thirty miles west to give Jon a tour of my hometown. I got to show him where I was born, where I went to school, and where I made my mom pack me a sack lunch because I just couldn’t make the 150-yard walk to my great uncle’s house without stopping to eat. Hey- 150 yards looks like miles to a five-year old! He also got to see the steep, concrete steps (all six of them) where my daddy dropped me when I was only a few months old. I tend to brag about surviving that incident as though it was Infant v/s Wild or something.

We also drove past my grandparent’s old house (hardly recognizable since their deaths years ago). It was a different color and both large trees in the front yard were gone, but I could see my younger sister and I making mud pies on the front porch, playing hopscotch on the sidewalk, and flagging down the milkman when he drove by- asking him to wait while we went inside to plead with pawpaw to buy us Push-Ups from the truck.

On our way back to my sister’s house, we drove through Maben- the nearest wet county to my hometown. With memories of our grandparents fresh on our minds, we reminisced about them driving us to the “medicine” store in Maben. Since we also took trips to the actual Drug Store when we were little (where we were actually allowed to get out of the car), it didn’t take us long to figure out those brown bags probably didn’t hold bottles of Milk of Magnesia.

Three hours later, we were still driving around. We had endured the lunch conflict- where two kids wanted McDonald’s over Sonic. So, we did what any responsible adults would do and catered to every request. We had endured tense comments between my sister and her husband over where they were going to live next- sprinkled with bitter resenting remarks over how he didn’t do anything for her on Valentine’s Day. We had endured my two nephews on the seat behind us- annoying each other (and me) with verbal and physical jousting. We had endured… well, only twenty-four hours thus far. As we arrived back at the house, I climbed out of the car and whispered to Jon- “I think I need to go to the medicine store.” We laughed and got through one more day without any brown, paper bags.