Our family of origin is gathering this weekend. People arrived from Texas, Arizona, California, Boston and New Jersey. The linchpins will not be there. My parents have been gone for nine and twenty two years. Yet their children and many of their grandchildren and great grandchildren will squish around one table to break gluten free bread. 

There are intangibles that endure after a couple slide out the back door and into eternity. We recited the same benediction that hovered over thousands of casseroles in our childhood. There are mannerisms that popped up in the faces of grandchildren who did not spend enough time with Poppy. One grandson told me that even as he pares down his earthly belongings in the itinerant millennial  lifestyle he will not part with the accordion camera he inherited. Also not left behind is the love of photography that inspired my father to feed his family by taking cutting edge medical pictures at UPenn. His grandson took pictures of moving light in a show called Fueled by Firefly in San Francisco.

Our dad loved music, having watched his own father play in a big band. He gifted me with a guitar on my thirteenth birthday, and I hoisted up gratitude in the campfire smoke as I played Leaving on a Jetplane and the Circle Game. Our mother loved good writing, and her granddaughter smiths words for an international company that brings water to third world countries. 

The brave among us crossed the lake in sailboats, in spite of the rain. But our tenacity was nothing compared to that of Dad when he was Benjamin's age and hanging on to the tippy top of the radio antennae on a Navy ship in an Alaskan winter. 

There were almost no physical belongings to divvy up when our parents breathed their last. Two floods saw to that. But I do wear my mother's wedding band, and feel blessed by her unflinching devotion to her promise. 

Some things are worth more than Grandma's china.