Cousins, All Grown Up

The cousins, minus three

Okay, I'll be the first to admit that I did not really want to leave the house on Saturday. It's been a strenuous spring (boo-hoo, poor me) and with Husband's surgery on Thursday, I had a good excuse to stay home and plead nursing duties instead of making the trip to my childhood hometown for a family reunion. I wasn't looking forward to the seven hours I'd spend in the car for this meet-up.

But my oldest uncle isn't doing very well, and it was his birthday,  and his daughters had arranged the entire shindig and all I had to do was SHOW UP, for heaven's sake, so I bestirred myself and got in the car.

People, do you have any idea how much I would have hated missing this? In this generation of my father's family are 14 cousins, and 11 of us were there. There were cousins I hadn't seen in 40 years (no, I'm not exaggerating; yes, I'm really, really old) and people came from Virginia, New York, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Colorado as well as from the far-flung corners of our own state.

It was So. Much. Fun.

Somehow with the passage of time we have become the generation I think of as being my parents' age, and instead of being old and fun-less (as I had imagined they were when I was young) this is a great age to be. We've passed the age of becoming, and we are what we are going to be instead of what we hope to be some day, and we're okay with ourselves. We barely mentioned our jobs; all the conversation was about family and who is living where and how many grandkids and "Do you remember when Grandma..?"

I can sum up the afternoon by relaying a conversation I had with my cousin M. If you look at the picture above, with the cousins artfully arranged in chronological order, you'll see that there was a passel of girl cousins before any boy cousins were born. We played together by the hour, sometimes at their farm and sometimes at ours, but M was generally the ringleader. She was adventuresome and outspoken (and gorgeous) and she had BOTH a horse and a motorcycle. Oh, yeah, M was the real deal.

In recent years we've reconnected on Facebook, but apparently she is not a complete fan of this blog because she's never clicked through the links I add to my profile when I've pushed more blather onto the internet. Saturday she brought her dessert over to the table where Much Older Sister and I were finishing lunch and began to quiz me.

"Just what is this Empty Feathers thing you have going on? Is it some kind of club? Do you meet every single day? Why do you keep talking about it on Facebook?" she pinned me with her older-cousin stare. Much Older Sister began to giggle.

"Uh, no, it's a blog, and I just write about whatever I'm thinking about," I told her.

"Well, good, because I came over here to tell you that your kids are grown up! Get over it! Get a life!"

Then we laughed until we cried, but it was touching as well as funny because she was concerned about me and thought I needed to shape up, and only cousins and siblings can tell you that kind of thing.