Whose family is normal?

We went over to see my mother this morning. The situation there always sets me off. My mother is 83 and my stepfater is 92. She has arthritis in just about every joint in her body and he has late-stage Alzheimer's. Two years ago, my youngest sister moved in. She was going to go back to school, but that didn't work out. Her daughter, Christina, moved in with her, which is fine.

Then Christina got a puppy, a sweet lovable dog they named Sasha. Again, cool.

Then my sister's son and his fiancee moved in with their dog, Loki. A little less fine. He is a perennial student. He as a trust fund that pays for his schooling, but he goes full-time, so he isn't able to contribute to the household finances.

My sister's boyfriend, who we all love, is there too, and he contributes a lot in caring for my stepfather and training the puppies. My sister and my niece are so soft-hearted, the puppies would be totally spoiled without Alfred's loving guidance.

My nepew bought a second dog, a female, which he promised he wouldn't breed until he finished school and moved out.

But Loki bred with Sasha, who hadn't been spayed yet, and the result was seven puppies, three of whom still live in the house. And last night, my nephew's second dog gave birth to three more puppies.

My mother says it's all fine with her, but I see chaos. I try to keep my nose out of it, but there are seven adults, nine dogs and two cats there now.

Egad.

So, I fumed about it this afternoon, as Peyton reminded me it's not my house, and if everyone there is OK, I should be too.

I guess I'll just grit my teeth and hope Peyton is right. For a 15-year-old, she's a pretty wise person.

This has been an amazing week with her. She laughs at my clothes and tells me I'm just totally unfashionable. She's trying to talk me into dying my hair to cover up the gray. But I'm 55 and I don't have a lot of gray yet. I like to think I've earned every gray hair I have.

Danny called tonight to make sure she's behaving and I told him she's been just perfect. He had a hard time believing his smart-mouth daughter is behaving, but she is, and we're having a great time with her.

We took Peyton to Joe's Rock today. It's a cliff that's in the woods behind the housing development that used to be our farm. I told her she's the fourth generation of my family to sit up there and look out onto the village of Sheldonville.

It's a town park now, and the parking lot is where Mr. Nolan's house used to be. He was a lion tamer, and in the summer, he kept the lions in big cages on his property. We would fall asleep to the sound of their roars when I was a kid. It's a memory I doubt many American kids have. She was slightly impressed when I told her about it. Slightly.

We drove through the village and pointed out all the places I remembered. The Wheelers' dairy farm, the cranberry bog, which is mostly filled in, Massey's Pond, where we swam until one of us found a leech on her skin, the meadow, the Cowleys' place, the Hendersons' house -- where my friend Sandy lived. Her parents told us we could call them Bob and Nancy, but my parents told us we were to call them Mr. and Mrs. Henderson. Then there was Darcy Omen who dressed up in a sailor suit to dance on a talent show on TV in Boston -- Community Auditions, sponsored by Community Opticians.

There was the house where the mom was always "napping" when her kids got home from school, with an empty bottle on the coffee table, and the house where the girl who forgot her underpants one day lived, and the family who had the kid with Down syndrome who took all kinds of abuse from the neighbors because they refused to "put her away."

Peyton was amazed that I coul point to almost every house in the village and tell her who lived there when I was a kid.

None of those families was "normal." Or all of them were. I'm not sure which.