Our house has a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with....

My dining room walls are painted a shade of rasberry that I love -- one wall is covered with a quote that Mark Twain wrote about his childhood home. It reads:

"Our house has a heart and a soul and eyes to see us with, and approvals and solitudes and deep sympathies, it is of us, and we are in its confidence and we live in its grace and in the peace of its benediction ... we can not enter it unmoved."

I have it up there because we live in the house I grew up in and it sums up my love for this house. My daughters are making brownies for the veterans and right in the middle of the baking extravaganza my 11-year-old Madison realizes we are coming back from the beach at the crack of dawn on Monday for the Memorial Day parade in our town.
She asks if her cousins are coming back that early.
 "No," I answer.
"Is Nana coming back that early?"
"No, Maddie, just us."
Well, when are they all coming back??" (I can see the tears welling up.)
"I don't know, Sweetheart, it's not about what they are doing, it's about what we are doing."
(cry,cry,cry) "They get a whole other day at the beach?!"
It is then when I hear my Eddie's voice yell down from upstairs, "Madison, we are a country at war and the men we are honoring on Memorial Day fought in battles so we can have the life we have. We are leaving the beach early to come back for the parade. End of story."
I love him in this moment for being the funniest person I've ever met, but dead serious when it comes to United States veterans.
(11-year-old tears, tears and more tears)
In my mind's eye, I see myself sitting in the same place looking up at my dad with the same freckled face, it's 1980 and I don't want to go to the parade. It's going to be hot, boring and I don't know if any of my friends are going.
"Sweet girl," I say in the calmest voice I can muster, "I know it's hard but it's what we do as a family and we will always do it -- we owe our lives to them and we are going to the parade. And guess who the grand marshal is. Mr.Walsh!" (she had just told me yesterday that Bob Walsh was her favorite veteran).
Her tears started to dry up and a look much older than her young self came over her face. She was resolved, and even though it wasn't what she wanted, even though she didn't fully understand why, she knew that by coming back for the parade she was somehow following the road less traveled (her Grampy's favorite poem)  and she had the wisdom to take it. She wiped her face with her filthy shirt she wore to soccer practice and got up to put candied American flags on each of the 12 brownies.

I felt like an old, strict parent. I questioned myself for a half a second. Then realized that years from now, when I am no longer here, maybe Madison would honor the veterans in whatever town she ends up in and say to her kids, "We're going home to make brownies for the men; it's what I used to do with my mom and on Monday we gotta get up early to get a good seat at the parade."