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<\/a><\/p>\nOn a small boat in the middle of Cayuga Lake, in the middle of October, I am drinking tea with my friends. In real china teacups. With saucers. We are a motley crew: me and my friends, Barb and Liz, and their fathers and one daughter, not mine. I no longer have a father or a daughter. At this moment it is easy to pine over this. But I\u2019m the only one of the three of us with a living mother. And, I remind myself, my son comes home from Afghanistan in two days. Still, I watch the fathers sitting together and can\u2019t help but think how my own father would have fit in perfectly. How my own daughter would have loved to be out on the lake in October. \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On a small boat in the middle of Cayuga Lake, in the middle of October, I am drinking tea with my friends. In real china teacups. With saucers. We are a motley crew: me and my friends, Barb and Liz, and their fathers and one daughter, not mine. I no longer have a father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-25"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/robinbotie.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nThe boat gently rocks as Barb pours the hot gourmet-blended tea into fragile cups with floral designs. It is our second annual teatime honoring the memory of her mother.
\n\u201cThese are lemon apricot scones from Collegetown Bagels<\/a> and chocolate chip scones from Greenstar<\/a>,\u201d says her daughter, passing two bags around.
\n\u201cTo mom,\u201d we all toast.
\nFor a minute I wonder what I am doing here. I never even met my friend\u2019s mother. I\u2019m the only one without a relative on the boat.
\nBut everyone here knows loss. Along with good and bad times, we build rituals into our individual life patterns to share the memories of the ones we lost. Today it feels like fathers and daughters are being shared too. I joke with the fathers and try to photograph the red fox the daughter points out on the shore.
\nClouds rolling over the sky hide the sun. I am having teatime in the middle of the lake in October because of the twists and bends my life path has taken. And because of the good friends I have found along the way.<\/a><\/p>\n