Chris spontaneously took the girls to Buffalo, New York, for a Labor Day family mini-reunion. Below, most of the description is written by Mary (9).
"My second trip was to Buffalo, New York. My Dad told me Friday that he was going to take me and my younger sister Margaret to Buffalo. We have a lot of family up there so there was going to be a family reunion. We did our school until 11:00 am when we have our art class. After art we had some free time and after that we left."
"We drove five hours until eight o’clock pm when we checked in at our hotel. When we woke up in the morning we drove another five hours until we arrived at my dad’s cousin Charlene’s house. We spent about twenty minutes there before heading over to my grandmother’s sister Mary’s house."
"Before we left Me and Margaret sang a song called “The Irish Rover.” It was an appropriate song because the Cousins (my grandmother’s side of the family had the last name Cousin) migrated from Cork, Ireland to New York and the ship in that song sailed from Cork to New York about fifty years prior to when the Cousins sailed there. We actually sang it so many times that my Dad caught me singing it in my sleep! Ha! Ha! Ha!"
Girls singing "Irish Rover" for the relatives
"I am sorry if I am confusing you with all these names and titles but I want to be specific. At great-aunt Mary’s house me and Margaret played in their little enclosed courtyard with a playground ball. When we were called in for lunch there was pizza and a few hours later we were called in for dinner which was salad. For dessert we had chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream. We then left to check in to our new hotel up there in Buffalo."
"The next day was Sunday. We went to mass at St. Anthony’s. It was a beautiful church and mass but if I could make some changes I would have made it cooler inside."
"After that we left to our hotel where we changed into play clothes. My dad took us over to “The property” as he called it. It really was this. A long time ago my great-uncle Conrad, who was an architect, bought a property and had some cabins built on it. He wanted it to be a place where all the Lauers and their offspring could gather together."
"He added a shelter with picnic tables under it, and trails which people could hike on."
"Some of the cabins only got finished last year. My dad said that the last time he has been there was when he was my age. At the camp there was a tire swing, an off roader, and a John deer gator."
"My cousin Arthur, he is fully grown, took me out on the off roader. We went really fast and he showed me where he had seen a bear a while ago."
"After we got back me, Margaret, and all the other kids built a cabin out of logs. We simply called it 'The kid’s cabin.'”
Back to Mama's voice . . . On the drive home, Chris took the girls to an exquisite and now-shuttered church in Pennsylvania whose building was organized by one of Chris' direct ancestors. His son was the first altar boy to serve there. And later, when this parish could no longer be sustained in the wake of destruction from the Second Vatican Council, and it had to be torn apart and sold, the baldacchino itself was sold to St. Thomas Aquinas parish right here in Charlotte! What a beautiful and poignant coincidence for our family.
They also stopped by the New River Gorge on their route home to see its majestic views!
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