Wild and Wonderful, Pt. 1

Part 0 (Summer in the Mountains) — Part 1 (Say Uncle) — Part 2 (Family… Sorta?)
— Part 3 (Fireflies)

Say Uncle

When Cassie and I were dating, as I gradually became a part of her family, her nieces decided to give me a nickname. See, her nieces weren’t quite sure what to call me before they became our nieces. So, since they had an aunt named Baby Cass, they decided a great name for me would be… Big Rich. Cassie made fun of me for the longest time after.

Eventually I became Uncle Rich which, in my opinion, has always sounded much better. Overtime, my claim to uncle-hood grew. I started with two nieces, which slowly grew to a whopping seven nieces. Ever since that first moment I was called “Uncle Rich” (or Uncle Ritchie), I’ve had an overwhelming desire to claim the title of Favorite Uncle! It was a dream that Cassie supported wholeheartedly, and that she even made her own. In fact, if we got to be near any of those seven girls, Cass would go out of her way to make me play with them.

To be the Best

I might not be the favorite uncle of all seven nieces, but I saw my chance to secure the Favorite-Uncle-Gold for two of them when I went to West Virginia. My original two nieces (9 and 6 years-old) were going with us. I was bursting at the seams with excitement for all the things we could do together.

We wound up going hiking at a few different state parks. We chased and raced each other up the trails. My aunt and I tried to teach them to skip rocks. When the littlest one got tired of walking, I carried her up the hills. When the oldest one got a stomach ache, I carried her down the hills. I did realize, however, that they may have been hamming it up just so I would carry them some more.

I finally had the time to teach my older niece how to crochet. There was a lot of frustration and we had to take a lot of breaks. But it wasn’t too bad. Teaching that 9 year-old how to crochet was actually eerily similar to when I tried to teach Cassie a couple years ago.

I got to show the two of them around my family’s farm too! I taught them a little bit about the birds and the bees (don’t worry, I mean the chickens, pheasants, quail and the beehives my uncle has there). I tried to show them how to milk a goat, only to spend 10 minutes wrangling and then squeezing one’s dried up utters—essentially leaving me with the feeling I was assaulting and molesting it—in front of my nieces, because I was misinformed about how much milk the thing produced. They thought it was fun though. We also checked out all the berries growing, found fossils in the slate rock there, and picked flowers from the field.

On the day I took them through a petting zoo, they surprised me with a gift. They picked out a little fridge magnet shaped like a hand-saw. It read, “Best uncle I ever saw.” Was it cheesy? Yes. But was it the best gift I could’ve asked for? Also yes!

A Grieving Uncle

A big part of the reason Cassie pushed me to be a better uncle was because she loved seeing how I might act with our own kids one day. Like most every other couple, we did look forward to having babies sometime. She had a “pregnancy pact” with her friends, she had just started talking to her doctor about family planning methods, and (because my last coupe was totaled in an accident) we had just bought a SUV because she wanted a car with “room to grow.” That aspect of my future changing was hard to cope with. For a while, I hated being around any of the countless little kids our friends or family had. At this point, it’s still not something I especially like to think about. But I do have a role model whose experience helped me process the situation.

Anytime his name was brought up, Cassie would sing the little kids’ song, “Father Abraham/ Had many sons/ Many sons had Faaaather Abraham.” Well the Book of Genesis tells us that long before he became “Father Abraham,” the man was “Uncle Abram.” Abram had gotten married with the hope of having children, was met with disappointment at every attempt, then was promised children by God without seeing Isaac born until dozens of years later. During those years of let-downs, unfulfilled dreams and grief over presumed infertility or miscarriages, Abram took responsibility for his brother’s kid, Lot. You see him making Lot a part of his family when Lot’s father died; we see Abram traveling everywhere and sharing all his possessions with Lot; we see Abram putting Lot before himself when choosing where to live; we see Abram getting involved in a war just to rescue Lot from a whole tribe of people; and we see Abram pleading, if not arguing, with God to save the city Lot was living in. Yes, one of the many ways Abraham was blessed with a child. But ultimately, he was blessed because of the way he cared for his nephew (Genesis 14).

One lazy afternoon I was walking down the road on the farm, the girls tagging along. I happened to be nibbling on an Oatmeal Cream Pie, which was arguably Cassie’s most beloved snack. I was caught up in the sweetness of the moment, so I decided to take a picture. In retrospect it was a kind-of-weird thing to do, but it felt right at the time. As such, I wasn’t expecting my nieces to ask why I was taking a picture. Nor was I expecting the answer that came out my mouth, “Because Cassie would.” Since she had passed away, I have been especially drawn to the things that she loved. When my nieces then told me that they missed Cassie, I was reminded of how much she had loved her nieces and I realized why I had been so excited to have fun with them on this trip.

Cassie knew children would still have been a ways off in the future. So until that dream could have ever come true, she just wanted to love the seven nieces God gave her and to make sure they knew it. I want to do nothing less. And it’s been a blessing that I still can.

Part 0 (Summer in the Mountains) — Part 1 (Say Uncle) — Part 2 (Family… Sorta?)
— Part 3 (Fireflies)