Glad to see you here. I read your blog from time to time and always enjoy it. I am curious about what part of Missouri you are from? I am from Osceola, MO, about an hour north of Springfield. I went East for college, south for law school, lived in Houston, TX for 10 years and then moved back home to Osceola.

Josh

“Oh yes,” said the farmer’s wife, beaming, “that’s our daughters house. No one builds small houses in Ireland anymore.”

The farmhouse we were staying in had five bedrooms as it was, and the couple only had two children, as far as I could tell. I hope it’s worked out for them.

Oh to still have a parent around to bother you…..but, Junior is back in town, fresh with a degree and so the old man employs him until he can get on “his feet” and find a job in a “hipper” locale so now I must suffer the damnable insult of he and his mother “organizing” La Cave de la Obstrepereppi so that it might be made “presentable” and, hello, the final perfidious straw: “Cheerful”.

Personally, I find cigars, assorted rock specimens, dust, the vintage little smiling and chewed Barney Chair the dog used to fit in, the snoring dog, untold stacks of paper in various dishabille, a machete, a Black Velvet Mexican Sombrero, assorted bird nests and my fine little ceramic statue ( depicted in a bracing little film short by the daughter when she negotiated it out of a Shanghai Antique Dealer) of Mao sitting in a rattan chair and smoking a hand-rolled to be quite cheerful enough thank you. Right now, I’d take the potato famine on a rock in blackest of Black Irish Cork over this importunate infringement upon my withered dignity.

But, how lovely to have noise again. It is amazing the music I’ve been missing since they have been away. Not to mention the fact that there is now a Greek Chorus informing me how incapable and mad I am instead of the solo act that had gotten a little run down and therefore, tending a tad too much toward bathos. The young bring new approaches to this important function.

Still, I cannot wait for the day when one of the ingrates shall produce a few sports and I can show up when they are 13 with a trampoline, a case of Sugar Daddies, some cigarettes and a bottle of peppermint schnapps.

Abstractly, intergenrational living makes a lot of sense – but then you remember how annoying your mom can be about some things!

I suspect we will see an increase in these sorts of living arrangements when economic necessity pushes people into it. I think these sorts of arrangements – if people can get along – take a lot of stress off the middle generations – those who are parenting now.