Family Reunion

Family reunions are as much a part of the South as fried food, football and faith. Food holds court and the head of the table is filled with a wide variety of fried chicken while the end is heavy laden with rich desserts made with creamy whole milk and real butter. Somewhere in the middle, variations of long cooked green beans, cheesy potato casseroles and sweet corn, all made with bacon grease or fat back, reign and compete for unspoken prizes as women gather sharing recipes and trade secrets.

Our family doesn’t hail from the cotillion south of party dresses and country clubs. We don’t gather on verandas sipping tea while holes are counted on the golf course. Our family hails from lands of rugged country where rocks jut forward defying crops to grow and where springs are hidden to the outsiders. It’s a land where the humidity sticks to you like old family names unchanged over countless decades. It’s a place where stories involve hunting and fishing holes. And we belong to a time where I can still feel the rush of the cold creek on hot summer days and smell the freshly cut hay.

I journey in among a clan of city cousins now accustomed to concrete pavements and skyscrapers. With calendars filled with appointments, obligations and stress, we arrive tired and looking to find what we can hardly remember against the backdrop of barns and pastures. The clan of country cousins arrives tired from hard outdoor living without regard to schedules that go beyond the seasons to plant and harvest.

Old family photographs line the tables and are thumb tacked to the walls of the old church attended by families past but ever present. We may come from different parts but we look alike -blue eyes that hold the promise of easier days and curly hair of blond or brown. Standing for obligatory pictures and posing again in an attempt to create more flattering ones, we tell tales that span the afternoon and generations past. Over the years, the stories have grown taller and our waists thicker but still we come back. We come back because we find that what we are looking for is in each other and our own connection to the past and the future is woven with the same DNA threads.

Country cousins and city cousins– we’re all the same. We fill the room with love and laughter. We share stories of birth and death and discuss both the hard and the good times. Our smiles are broad, the hugs are solid and teachers of the past still whisper in the air the southern mantra “God, Country, and Family.”