A few years before that mighty Walton patriarch died in the 1970's,  I sat on a hillside of aspens in the shade of Timpanogos and listened to Will Geer being introduced by a very ruddy Robert Redford in the late summer chill at Sundance. 

One of my favorite vignettes of twentieth century television is the classic sign-off sequence from The Waltons, everyone under one roof from grandparents to grandchildren, shouting their love to each other through aged floral wallpaper, with Will as the silvered senior of that clan, Zebulon Walton.

"Good night, Erin.  Good night Jim-Bob.  Good night, Grandma.  Good night, John-Boy."

It was a happy, comforting image, the notion of so many people bound to each other under one roof, all broadcasting their love.  We went to sleep with it, dreamed of it.

But it was television.  It wasn't real life. 

Our real life got interrupted a few years later when my father died in 1979 at the age of 48, leaving my mother widowed with six young children, four of them still at home.  

It might as well have been the Titanic's epic sideswipe; we jumped for liferafts and focused on survival.  Thirty years later, what remains is a cobbled together hodgepodge of a family loosely threaded with love, traditional in some ways and completely not in others, with its own rules, its own idiosyncracies, its own wonders.

But it isn't The Waltons.

My four younger sisters ended up being raised by two women after the death of my father, my mother and an angel great-aunt who came with my father's illness and never left.

We all married later and created our own versions of family.  I married someone three decades my senior and became a grandmother on my wedding day.  My married sisters are all currently stay-at-home moms.  My brother has been a stay-at-home dad and has workshared with his wife.  All of us have at one time or another taken turns making a home and a life for our youngest sister's only child.  Two households have taken in unexpected foster children in the past two years leading to adoption.  Some have combatted the ravages of illness, addiction and disability.  All have defined their own lives on their own terms as their own families and realities have evolved.

My sisters seem to have survived being raised by two mothers.  My brother's children seem perfectly happy to have him be a nurturer.  I adore my grandchildren.

Our greater extended family includes doctors, lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers, entrepreneurs, stay-at-home moms, stay-at-home dads, welfare dependents, married, single, gay, straight, rich, poor, addicts, mentally ill, extroverts, introverts, developmentally disabled, autistic, artistic, athletic, not so much, religious, secular, Mormons, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, Buddhists, soldiers, scholars, never married, divorced, children who've never known their biological father, abused, loved, authors, apostates, AIDS victims, alcoholics, dreamers, doers, domestic, not so much, depressed, joyful, rage, reason, from Puget Sound to Sanibel, the Oregon coast to the Utah mountains and the Wisconsin northwoods.

At any given time, we might not all be talking to each other, let alone living or sharing air under the same roof.  It took my mother's sudden critical hospitalization in January to accomplish that, her gossamer lines binding.

We can occasionally forgive, don't always forget, occasionally forget, don't always forgive.  We find our own balance and the economy of our own emotional investment.

We are our parents' children.

I've had a lovely soft dream, a dream of my sisters sitting on a hillside, young and beautiful, fresh of face, the sisters of a dreamworld where reality braces no burden. 

Will Geer was an overgrown hippie when I encountered him in quaking aspen glory, bohemian and wonderful, not at all a Walton.

Neither are we. 

In happier times, our non-Walton family, from left to right:  me, my father, younger sisters and mother on a Christmas Eve long ago and far away.  My brother was taking the picture.  

top:  Late summer chill at Sundance

center:  In happier times.  The Waltons.