Family group texts

As a family of five in the '70s and '80s in Clanton, Alabama, we had the idyllic life. My younger twin brothers and I lived with our parents at the dead-end of a 2-mile dirt road on 20 acres of land in the middle of BFE where we grew and picked and canned and cooked every vegetable known to the modern human species in a garden the size of two city blocks, where we also raised chickens, goats, ducks, rabbits, a few pigs and a cow, not to mention an quasi-ferrel throng of cats and dogs. Our little country life was all we had when we came home from school at night. It's what made up our weekends, and it's pretty much all we had all summer long when my brothers and I were out of school, as well as my dad who was a school teacher. We didn't have neighbors, we didn't have friends over, we didn't go out and about... the farm, the animals, the woods and the five of us were enough to keep us occupied whenever we weren't on the bus going to school, sitting in school or attending church on Sunday. And every single night for the first 13 years of my life, the five of us ate at the dinner table every night. No ifs, ands or buts. No exceptions. We said a prayer before we ate, then we dug in. Whatever issues were going on in our lives were brought up then and there. Fights. Laughter. Tension. Praise. School. Work. Phone calls were ignored. No TV. It was our time. Family time. This was when mom or dad gave sage advice and answers to whatever was going on, while at the same time we were expected to lick our plates clean whether we liked what we were given or not. Then when I was 13, my mom announced she and my dad were getting a divorce. I was expecting it and I knew it was time. Things were weird for about a year until my mom, my two brothers and I moved to a town an hour away to start a new life. There were no more dinner table dinners as my brothers and I were making up for lost time being able to actually see other human beings after 3pm on weekdays and my mom was busting her ass making bank to support herself and three kids. Meanwhile, my dad remarries, and a few years later, my mom does the same. I never even saw my mom and dad in the same room together again after their divorce until one summer while I was in college in Knoxville, I woke up from surgery and saw my dad and my step-mom sitting on one side of the recovery room and my mom and my step-dad on the other. Talk about tension... thank God I was on morphine. Fast forward 30 years. My brother Stuart and his wife, Heather, have found a way to revive the dinner table. They have three beautiful boys and all kinds of craziness going on. So whenever something happens, one of them will group-text the other four of us. And in a way, we're back at the dinner table at that moment. Sometimes it's a touchdown their oldest kid made. Once, it was a kerfuffle that broke out between the youngest nephew and a classmate that sent them both to the ER. Tonight, it was a snake on the roof. Yeah, a snake on the roof. I'm not kidding. My brother doesn't know how it got up there. But they all had a field day with it and had to tell us all about it. And I love it. He found a way, once again, for all five of us to talk around the dinner table again 32 years later. Even though all five of us with five different lives and five different things going on are sitting behind our five different phones in five different cities all over the southeast. No matter where I am or what I'm doing, when I see a group text from one of them to the five us, it's like I'm sitting at that dinner table again for a brief moment in time. And I'm happy.