What a nice day!

Long ago when we were in grad school and expecting our first child, a family moved into our neighborhood and church congregation. My husband was getting his degree in German, the husband in this family was getting his in classics/Latin. I was getting my degree in ESL, and the wife of that family had an ESL degree already. They were multilingual and loved books and interesting food and good humor. When we graduated and began our nomadic lifestyle searching for a tenure-track job, they were always somewhere on the way when we were moving. Each of our families ended up with five kids who, if they don't meet exactly in age, at least do in interest. (Computers, programming, music, books, general silliness.) He's now a professor in Utah, and thanks to some kind of imaging program he's working with, had actually a grant to come up to a small nearby town to work with the software/imaging developer. So they made a trip of it and came up and spent the day. So fun! It wasn't really warm (55?), but it was sunny and everyone had a grand time playing, running around, doing music, looking at their oldest child's films on line, etc. They're going home via Yellowstone, so we sent them off with a copy of my SIL's itinerary (she had a paid internship as a librarian there one summer).

We move often, and we generally tend to like most people we meet, and find ways to connect with them. But every so often you just meet a whole family who really gets where you're coming from (ie you don't have to explain why you are in an obscure branch of the humanities, they understand the whole academic inflatable furniture lifestyle from the inside, random bits of Spanish/Portuguese/German/Turkish/Latin that fly around don't bother anyone, and some family members are already snuggling up with your bookshelves). It's just nice.