John and I belong to a marriage group that has met most weeks for half a year. Sometimes the people barely fit inside our office such that the last person has to enter, then slide her chair in front of the closed door before sitting. But this week there were four of us. The unfilled chairs stared at us, reminders of the friends who were absent. But then we fell into the kind of private conversation that can expand into cleared space. 

We talked about the generations around us... grandparents, children, grandchildren. The connections come in so many varieties, much like the garden center I went to last week to choose vegetables for my raised beds. 

For years I held a chip on my own shoulder, staunchly balanced even as we moved from Florida to New Mexico to California. The distance between my children and their grandparents was as wide as a continent, and there wasn't a single Christmas, Easter, or Thanksgiving we spent together in twenty-one years. But who's counting? I grumbled none too quietly about the relationships that could never thrive across such a cavernous gap. My own mother didn't come when my babies were born, for reasons she could not explain. I gripped the blinders blocking the view of kindly folks who were as generous to my children as any nana.

My indignation seems like such a waste to me now.

When my children finally lived near my mother, as in the apartment attached to our house, she had succumbed to a body that could not dance. Arms too frail to hold babies. But she did keep a stash of chocolate covered raisins in a drawer to lure them in. I regret that I frowned at this indulgence. 

The feelings I had for my own grandmother were as sweet as her warm cinnamon rolls. Yet I was one of a hundred descendants and she might have had trouble picking me out of a crowd. Which is what Rose gatherings always were. The closest I came to spending quality time with her was the Christmas party when she and Pop pop  gave each grandchild a silver dollar, then as those became more dear, a dollar bill tucked in a red felt stocking. She owned a pewter cigarette lighter that was engraved with her grandchildren's names and birth dates, and I would always check to make sure mine was still there. It was. Which meant I belonged. By sheer luck I inherited her rolling pin.  

One time I went to a memorial service for an elderly man who had the good sense to go just a few months before his wife of sixty years. You know. To get ready for her. A couple of his grandsons spoke at the reception. One of them sobbed. I remember wondering if I had cried that hard when my grandparents died. Or whether I would ever get a chance to be the kind that would make a grown man weep over the loss of me.

The chairs beside the four of us at marriage group may have seemed vacant. Then again maybe they were there for our own grandparents. To get to know us better.