The Days of Our Lives in Pine Valley were usually quiet, but that was before All My Children came home for the annual Founder’s Day festival. It was As the World Turns that old secrets begin to surface, casting long shadows under the summer sun.
My mother, the matriarch, always said our family was like One Life to Live, a single thread in a larger tapestry. But as I stood on the porch of The Bold and the Beautiful Victorian on Elm Street, watching the chaos unfold, it felt more like we were all just Guiding Light for each other’s poor decisions.
It started when my sister, The Young and the Restless, announced she was leaving her husband for a man she’d met on Another World—a cruise ship bartender named Fernando. My father, a stalwart of General Hospital, simply sighed and said, “This is what happens when you Search for Tomorrow in all the wrong places.”
The real drama, however, began at the town’s only elegant restaurant, Ryan’s Hope. Over a tense dinner, my uncle, a lawyer from The Edge of Night, revealed he’d found documents proving the deed to the family estate was fraudulent. “It seems our rightful Brighter Day was built on a lie,” he intoned, sipping his brandy.
Suddenly, our lives felt like a cheap episode of Passions, full of swirling accusations and gasped revelations. My grandmother, the true Love of Life in our family, merely smiled serenely and said, “Oh, hush. We’ve weathered worse. This is just a Port Charles in our storm.”
She was right, of course. By the time the last guest left and we were cleaning up the discarded streamers, a sense of calm had returned. We were bruised, but not broken. We sat together on the porch swing, watching the sunset paint the sky, a family once again united. It was, we all silently agreed, a truly Beautiful end to the day.