My cousin, 12 years my senior, is the gracious host opening up her beautiful ranch home to my family and my niece. We settle in and without hesitation my boys are calling her ‘aunt Lori’ because she feels like an aunt to them. Before I can blink an eye they are off on the four wheelers. My heart skips a beat. What if they hit a ditch and flip? What if they go too fast and lose control? I worry to no avail because they fly by with smiles plastered to their faces. Before the sun settles into the tree line they are on the back porch with their dad and ‘uncle Mark’ shooting at clay pigeons. I hide inside. What if they accidentally point that thing at me? Their cheeks hurt from smiling they say.
I turn to my cousin who is laughing at me as she gets hamburger meat prepared for our cook out. “Do you really think being behind that glass door will protect you?” she says. I laugh along with her and help her with dinner. We talk about family, get caught up on all of her siblings and their children and even their children’s children. I talk about my siblings and their children. I explain how grateful I am to have this time with my niece and that she actually wants to be with us for spring break. We reminisce about the times when our rather large family got together on the family farm. She knew it as once being our grandmother’s home…I knew it as my aunt and uncle’s home (her mom and dad)… no matter. It was in the family. We have (I think…) 29 1st cousins, and so many 2nd and 3rd cousins I can’t even try to figure out the numbers. When my grandmother passed at the age of 95 in 2006 she had 72 descendants.
When Sweetgraw (my grandmother, also known as Grandmother and Grammer) passed she took along with her something that was very important to me, other than the gift of having her here with me. In her passing the family seal was broken. The family farm has been sold. The families now have their own traditions and gatherings around Christmas trees. My children don’t know what it is to walk into a home that is overcrowded and filled with loud boisterous laughing, talking, quarreling and story telling and the comfort of knowing that every single person that fills the room is related.
What can I say? I’m nostalgic. 😉 Family means something to me. The saying ‘the tie that binds’ is true. My boys see their cousin, Sarah, just a few times a year and yet they get along as if they are siblings. They see their ‘aunt Lori’ even less, yet they find a comfort that comes natural to being in her home. This summer they met two cousins from my mom’s side of the family, an uncle I haven’t seen in nearly 20 years, and the kids got along as if they had known each other since birth. It’s not the awkward first meeting of friends, it’s the comfortable settling in of pals that have an unspoken bond.
I think it is this family bond that needs to be revisited and embraced. Who we are, where we come from, what gene pool are we swimming in? Everyone wants to know where they belong. Maybe if we focused more on the importance of family we’d see more the gift we have in the importance of adding one more life to it?
Blessings
Shannon
Pictures from our Spring Break 2012
On our way home we decided to go through Nacogdoches, Texas, where Neal and I first met and attended college. We showed the boys our dorms, the campus, where we had our first date, etc. Then Neal went around to my old dorm and to the Ag Pond. I knew what we would find but I wondered if he did too. Sure enough he stopped where it all began…
