The Martha Chronicles (I): introduction

Today I did that cool thing blog sites allow you to do .... post into the future. It's some god-awful hour of the early morning that I won't share ... but this tidbit should post at 6 a.m., (hopefully) about the time Delta 3788 goes wheels up from Logan, taking me to Minneapolis for a weekend of family saturation.

Very glad to go. It's gusty and rainy in Beantown and a break is welcome.

And besides, we're celebrating my Grandma Anderson's 90th birthday.

It'll be a party all weekend, peaking Saturday night with a dinner in the Nokomis Heights Lutheran Church basement. Cousins from Managua, Stockholm and San Francisco will be there. My sister Missy is creating something like 95 pounds of mashed potatoes and my uncle is roasting enough pork to feed 60. The Denison sisters will sing Martha's favorite hymn. Speeches will undoubtedly be poured out. Daughters and grandchildren will serve the meal wearing the family aprons, sewn by Aunt Barbara and trimmed with Great-Grandma Anderson's hand-made lace. Then someone will arrange us all in several dozen configurations for photos of it all.

Hooray for Martha. I hope she does a lot of what she is doing in this photo.

So in deference to the great lady from Sweden, I dedicate this normally narcissistic blogspace for this day and the next 2 days to her and entirely to her.

Pictures and stories to come. In the meantime, first things first ... a salute to the motherland:

Skål!