Today my house is very quiet, a little too quiet. We just had a lovely four-day visit with my sister and cousin Sunshine and her 2-year old Byron, who may be the next Einstein (you heard it here first, folks). This made five generations in our house: Nanny, representing the Silent Generation; my husband, representing the Baby Boomers; me, my sister and cousin, representing Gen X; The Girls, representing the Millennials; and Byron, representing Generation Z. You might think we would have a hard time coming up with an activity that appeals to so many different generations – at our house such an occasion calls for a tea party! Our menu included traditional tea sandwiches (sliced cucumber or homemade cheese spread on thin buttered white bread), shrimp, tiny crackers with almond butter and raisins, sorrell jam, and two kinds of tea. We broke out the china and the crystal, and even laid a tablecloth for good measure. We also had a guest, Cole, who by luck was musically inclined and so also qualified as entertainment. We put him in the hot seat, next to Nanny.

Right off the bat Nanny asked him where he was from. I was pretty sure that, being a Millennial like The Girls, he would probably bungle the question and say, “Georgia.” But this kid was slick; when Nanny asks you where you are from she means your ancestral background, and he informed her that not only was his family Scottish, but they were descended from the Wallace clan (which you are all familiar with, having seen Braveheart). She got pretty excited about that. A good tea party relies on interesting guests; Cole automatically qualified, being Scottish, but descending from the Wallaces elevated him to legendary status in her eyes.

If you’ve also seen Alice in Wonderland you know that a good tea party is a lot like musical chairs. Ours rotated quite a bit. My husband declined the tea but stole several shrimp and left to watch football; Dallas (another Millennial) stopped by and had a couple of sandwiches, and brought Jade, an extraordinarily well-behaved Gen Z toddler who polished off the rest of the shrimp; the rest of us wandered back and forth from the table picking at the leftovers. After the tea party we had a fire going in the living room and the Millennials and the Zs built a Little Tykes house and played marbles while Cole played guitar in the background. Watching them, I am reminded of a poem I stumbled across recently by Antoine de Saint-Exupery:

In a house which becomes a home,
one hands down and another takes up
the heritage of mind and heart,
laughter and tears, musings and deeds.
Love, like a carefully loaded ship,
crosses the gulf between the generations.

Let us build memories in our children,
lest they drag out joyless lives,
lest they allow treasures to be lost because
they have not been given the keys.
We live, not by things, but by the meanings
of things.

Sometimes I do not know if we are handing down, or they are handing up; whether I am building memories or they invite me to be a part of theirs; whether I have keys to give or I just stumble across theirs. But I do know that love crosses the gulf between the generations. Just like a tea party.