I recently spent a few days with some of my cousins on my mother’s side. Our families share land that is dear to all of us, and once a year we meet there to do some business and have a picnic and get caught up.
I never lived near any of my cousins; the closest was when three of us lived in a hour’s triangle from each other, and mostly we got together for Thanksgiving a few times. Cousins were never part of my everyday life. But they were a part of my summers, as we would fly or drive from all over the country to meet at the family place near Mt. Rainier, to be loved by our grandparents, to throw rocks in the creek when we were little and to build dams in the creek when we got older.
Now that we are all older, I have a different appreciation for my cousins. We’re in various stages of child-rearing. A few are grandparents, while the youngest child of our children’s generation is just four. We’ve had successes and less so of careers and marriages and managing it all. The oldest of our generation died 40 years ago, and I hardly knew him.
