Dateline August 7, 2017, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill
We left Rhode Island and drove up to Cape Cod to see Janice's Aunt Margaret and Uncle Bill, taking the scenic route along the coast and over the bridge, with a stop along the way to work on the blog for an hour. We pulled in around two in the afternoon, and it was good to see them. Margaret had a health scare about eight months back but seems nearly herself again, and Uncle Bill, who turns ninety on the sixteenth of October, has not changed a bit. We are under strict orders not to disclose Aunt Margaret's age.
Their daughter-in-law Karen Otis, married to Janice's cousin Bob, was visiting, which made it all the better. The last time we were all together was more than fifteen years ago, when Bill and Margaret hosted a family reunion for the dedication of the Mercy Otis Warren statue in Barnstable, set alongside the statue of her brother, James Otis Jr. Nearly all of Janice's relatives turned out, and the fun of it was meeting Otis cousins we had never known at the ceremony.
The Otis family. Janice's Otis family left a real mark on the American Revolution. Mercy Otis Warren was perhaps the most influential woman writer of the revolutionary years, largely self-taught, who used poems, plays, and pamphlets to argue the patriot cause and later wrote a full history of the Revolution. She corresponded with the Adamses, Jefferson, Hancock, Patrick Henry, and the Washingtons, though her friendship with John Adams cooled when her history judged him too sharply, until friends mended it. Much of her work first appeared anonymously, and in 2002 she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Her brother, James Otis Jr., gave the Revolution some of its bedrock ideas, among them the thinking behind what became the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. Remarkably for his day, he held that the natural rights of life, liberty, and property belonged to everyone, writing in his 1764 Rights of the British Colonies that the colonists were "by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black." The family even traces back to Edward Doty, one of the passengers on the Mayflower.
The turkeys. Margaret and Bill made dinner and we sat a long while catching up on everyone. They have a flock of wild turkeys that has taken to hanging around the house; Bill would happily see them gone, since they make a meal of the plants, but Margaret will hear none of it. We joked that there was enough turkey out there to feed another reunion come Thanksgiving.
The next day was a rainy one, but we got out for a walk with Aunt Margaret whenever the rain let up. She covered some three miles over the course of the day and was still going strong; Janice says she wants to be as full of energy as Margaret when she grows up. That evening they took us out to a lovely local restaurant for dinner and more good talk.
Stopping to see them is always a treat, and we hope to keep doing it for many summers to come. In the morning we would point north for a little golf.
