Blood and water

"Blood is thicker than water." Though I didn't always know precisely what they meant by it, this is a saying I heard from relatives on my mother's side throughout my childhood. My great-grandmother Grammar tended to utter these words when she believed family members needed to close ranks against outsiders, or at least think and behave in a manner worthy of the family name. This maxim always seemed to me to have a judgmental quality to it. For example, Grammar and her daughters, my great-aunts and grandmother, were notorious for making fun of the looks and character of every woman my poor great-uncle John Bundy tried to go out with. It is all too easy to imagine that this phrase was a major weapon in the arsenal with which they kept him single and at home until the day he died.

It's hard to say precisely what the phrase meant to my manic-depressive great-grandfather. With his expanding lands in western Kentucky, Papa was big on caring with style for his wife and six children, and he provided for a fairly large number of distant cousins as well. Still, his pattern was to go moaning to bed for the entire winter, "groveling in the ashes," as my mother used to say. Then he would leap up with manic energy at the return of spring and resume his farming and his hobby, which was to buy up at rock-bottom prices the farms of his neighbors who were in financial difficulties.

However Papa generally felt about people who were not blood kin, one summer early in the century his own sister Lucy was in trouble due to debts on her farm owed to the bank. As best as I can make out, Papa heartlessly bought that farm right out from under her—and refused to sell it back to her later, no matter what she offered.