Ghosts of the past

I have always felt we had a close family. So it has been interesting in the last week to be with extended family members who we haven't seen for some years in some cases.
It is easy to pick up a whole lot of threads with people who really I don't know terribly well, and yet there is an interface because we share the lives of individuals who we have known.
It is a melancholy reflection of age, I think, that we need to value our family. I think this can be overstated, but we should not be blasé about our families; for ill or for good.
I am conscious of the fact that one way we often deal with family difficulty is by ignoring our family and perhaps withdrawing from it, but we don't escape quite so easily. Walking in the last few days around the haunts of my youth I am glad that I have a sense of ghosts being laid to rest. Ghosts which in many cases I hadn't fully appreciated.
We don't have to blow trumpets or confront anything necessarily but we should at least not try to ignore where we come from, who we are or what has happened to our folk.
I hope you might think about this (if you want) without me having to do more than just tell you that it has been good for me to muse about this in the last few weeks