family reunion

I am amazed by families who stage family reunions. Faithfully. Regularly. One family I know holds one every other year, in a different part of the country: say the desert southwest or New England. Impressively organized.

Somehow, the family I grew up in scattered wildly and, well, wasn't all that big. And the people who might have organized reunions passed away rather young.

So in my family, my mother-in-love's side is the one who holds family reunions. In recent years, the tradition waned. The queen of family reunions, Aunt Jean Thayer, passed away several years ago. What a fun lady. Never married, Jean called all extended family HER family. She kept scrapbooks and traced genealogy lines back hundreds of years.





So. Today the Thayers gathered once more. Here in Delaware. Maybe 35 of us. Some of the older cousins laughed over memories of childhood together. Other cousins barely know each other. But good food, a swimming pool, and an "old men's card game" served to draw us all together.