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I drove to Prince Edward Island for the funeral of the last of my mother's cousins. Martin died as a teenager, Walter died a year ago, and Mary, who had been the one who kept in touch with Mom, died a week ago at the age of 85. She and her husband had no children, but Walter had ten, of whom nine are still alive and six still live on the Island. (They are my second cousins.) Cousin Ed and his wife were in Turkey with their baby, and their daughter Olivia was in Toronto. That left 19 year old Noah and 16(?) year old Gabe, baching it. Cousin Marian was looking in on them when she e-mailed me about the funeral. When I said I'd be there if I could, Noah said, "Joe can stay with us." So that's what I did.

I left late on Monday, spent the night in Augusta, Maine, and arrived in Charlottetown in time for the evening part of the wake on Tuesday. The funeral was Wednesday morning. There was a family gathering afterwards at Noah and Gabe's home. Then in the evening I had dinner at a nice restaurant with Noah and Gabe. Thursday I visited Walter's widow and Mary's widower and left for home. After spending the night in Bangor, Maine, I got home about 2:00 p.m. on Friday.

Of course, there is now a ton of stuff that I could have handled if I had stayed home — not least my income taxes, for which we have an extension to May 11 because of flooding in this area in early April. So although I'm back and catching up on the blogs, I'll probably be posting and commenting less than usual for several more days.