Huff Family Reunion 2012

My absence is due to a long weekend full of travels to eastern Ohio for a family reunion and some (maybe) restful moments away from work. I saw some familiar faces and spaces and enjoyed a great deal of fun times with my dear family. 

The recaps are going to come in installments, because (you know me) I took a bahzillion pictures and want to share a lot of it all with you. I'm starting with the Huff Family Reunion in Dover, Ohio. 

My family has been having this biennial reunion for over 20 years now. For years, we met at a hotel resort on Atwood Lake in the boonies of eastern Ohio. After some economic turns in the region, the resort changed hands and purposes and we were left to find a new host for our event. The result? We moved back "home" to Dover, where my grandpa grew up. This little town, filled with lots of german and Moravian descendants,  is the origin of the Francis Huff and Adella Portz family. We enjoyed being surrounded by our own history. 

Saturday included a tour of the family home, which was built my my great grandfather many years ago. It is still in the hands of the family that purchased it from my great grandma some 20 years ago. My family traipsed about the house poking into little corners admiring and remembering. I was too little to recall my visits to grandma's house as a toddler, but most had very specific and beautiful memories and they shared stories. 

My uncle Tim and his cousin, Kip, remembered hiding treasures in a secret door in a wooden panel. My dad didn't even know it existed! Sneaky sneaky. My 2nd cousin, Andrew recalls tossing toys down the 3 story laundry chute. I was amazed as I thought about the work my great grandfather must have put into this building. I adore the old, original hardware and his beautiful woodwork. 

The home was surrounded by beautiful gardens and yards where children have played for over a hundred years. Three generations of "Huffs" toured the family home together. What an honor to have a family that values this history.

I've always enjoyed getting together with my father's side of the family. We're fun people often with a strange sense of intelligent humor. We're kind and yet a tid bit sassy. (We don't evade the normal family dramas...)  The gang is a diverse one. You'll find, as you click through my hyperlinks on this page that we're all over the map in careers and passions. We're a melting pot of conservative and liberal, old-fashioned and modern, scientific and creative. (As I make these links, I realize we are often VERY creative.) We hail from: OH, MI, MT, CA, IL, NY, MN, GA, MA, & AZ. 

I love my family. I can't wait until next reunion. Just think how the little ones will have grown by then! And who knows what I'll be doing then...time shall tell.

You Can't Inherit an E-book

I watched this new kindle commercial the other day. The e-book ad tactics are now edging for a different corner of the market: paper book "hold outs" like me. Die hard book readers (even those, like me, who don't pick up a book as often as she should) who love the heft of the spine, the flutter of the pages, the dusty, musty, sweet breath of a book. We're fighting the good fight, trying to keep publishing and book arts alive. Even without the kindle the publishing world is struggling. Newspapers are barely breathing, let alone poetry chapbooks.

I was struck with the way in which the girl in the commercial was so easily swayed by the sheen of the screen. She seemed like such a push over. But I'll admit, I might consider an e-book. They're easy and little and, I have to admit, shiny in a new toy kind of way. And I could deal with not dog-earing pages. I could manage without the wrist strain from reading War and Peace or Goblet of Fire in bed. There are aesthetics of books that, though I'd be sad to lose, I wouldn't DIE without.

But, there is one convincing argument I haven't been hearing amongst the hold-outs: you can't inherit a e-book. In 20 years who, besides the same geeks who keep a drawer full of floppy disks for prosperity's sake, is going to pick up a 2011 kindle at an antique store? Electronics don't have staying power. They upgrade every month, constantly changing and improving on the last version. An old ipod is just landfill fodder, but my record collection is something I can pass on.

E-readers ruin the community experience of a book. Used to be, the natural course of reading went something like this. A person would:

1) read a book,

2) feel moved or especially entertained by it and either

3a) add it to their library as a trophy or to revisit at another date, or

3b) pass it on to someone else who they were reminded of while reading the book.

All you can pass on to a friend after reading an e-book is a recommendation or a gift card for a free upload. You can't pass on the underlined sections, the tear-stained page, and you can't write a note inside the cover. You won't bequeath a first edition e-book in a will. What charm is there in inheriting a library of books you can't hold in your hands? No list of names on an old checkout card. No makeshift bookmarks that fall out of the pages like secrets: a polaroid, a grocery list, a fiction-pressed flower.

I'll stick to the real thing for now, even if it does mean packing one less pair of shoes in my vacation luggage. It's worth it in the end.