Dept. of big thoughts

On Friday night, the six of us went out to dinner. Mike and Lynn and Adam and Jennie joined Sandra and yours truly.
The official reason for the gathering was a birthday celebration. Jennie's was last week and Lynn's is in the week ahead. The real reason, though, is that Sandra and I couldn't remember the last time that the six of us had a chance to talk at length, undeflected by children or parents or cats or dogs.
For three hours we talked. A surprise thunderstorm flashed and rumbled through town and we kept talking. It was good. We generally do a pretty good job of staying in touch and see each other on holidays. Nevertheless,  a bunch of stories can sink below the noise level of daily living. It takes the question "What's the latest on ...?" for us remember that something reached a de facto conclusion a couple of months ago, but we'd not said so out loud.
So, the stories of projects and work and kids and parents present and gone filled the hours. It was very good.
In 1997, Sandra and I put together a 10-year mission statement for us. We pinned it to a bulletin board in our home office. As we shuffled stuff in the house this past year, we moved that bulletin board and realized that it was time to update the statement. We got a lot of things right through those years, even though almost nothing that we'd came out as planned. We expect a similar result for our new mission.
We told the others about our updated thoughts. Then, at the end of the dinner, with our napkins on the table, we wrapped up this rare time with a brief reflection of our dreams.
All of us have reached a point where our dreams are not for ourselves but for the next generation. And, even in that, our hopes for our (grand)children were not that they'd do certain types of work or achieve certain levels of prosperity or fame, but their characters could flourish.
My mother would say that she was planting winter wheat, that the harvest wouldn't come during her lifetime. This dinner gathering is part of that harvest. It's a good yield, for sure.