Roots. Wings. Waterslides.

Family eccentricities come in all sorts of colors. I know that some families have bright, sunny colors. Not just yellow or red, but maybe canary or candy-apple. They express themselves in bright, shiny ways. Mine just happens to come in an array of olive and pea greens that you can’t decide if it’s vomit-colored or something you’d paint your living room in.
They do things like whisky taste by our heritage, fall asleep during the Mass that honors our grandparents, buy embarrassing matching shirts, and forget each other’s names in less of a misspeaking way and more of a “I really don’t know your name and now have to ask someone what it is” way. My sister and I take to referring to the family as “them” instead of “us” as to clearly draw the line between sane and crazy.
They have an irritating way of mispronouncing words (“antee-pastee” is a salad of cucumbers, olives, feta, and cut meats) that is almost too easy to criticize, and encourage everyone, including my 80 year old grandfather, to participate in whichever form of wrestling they’ve chosen to display in the hotel hallway at 2 am, shortly before making embarrassing phone calls to the lobby about the beer and wine supply running low. But when you have three whole days with these people, even skeptics start to succumb. By Saturday night I was discussing the physics of leg-wrestling with an uncle while my sister dialed the lobby’s extension.
Our family is moving, and we recently re-painted every room in the main floor of the house some of brown. You might call one room shit, another butt hole and one more dust. But we call them bark, linen and latte.