It’s too bad people are losing touch with family

Julie Seedorf, Something About Nothing

Published Monday, September 28, 2009

A couple of years ago I wrote about selling my relatives on eBay. Well, this year I decided to try something new. I invited my relatives to dinner. This is such a rare occasion that some of the relatives that visited my home had not been to this area in 39 years. They are big-city people, Los Angeles area to be exact. I also invited my cousin from Albert Lea. We are always going to get together. She and I have sang the song “Let’s get together, yah, yah, yah. Two is twice as nice as one. Yah, Yah, Yah” and then we never get together.

It was a joyous day visiting with my long lost cousins. I am so glad I did not sell their pictures on eBay. What would my excuse have been that I couldn’t show them any old pictures of themselves had I sold them on eBay?

First of all I gave instructions to those city slickers before they visited my home. Actually they were more like warnings than instructions.

No. 1: Do not wear black! Sam likes to give visitors souvenirs of his white hair.

No. 2: Visiting my house is like camping in a tent trailer like we did in Colorado.

No. 3: We are very excited that you are visiting, but if you haven’t read my column, you don’t know that my cooking is sometimes strange.

They were a little confused by the directions I gave them. These were the instructions: From Highway 22 turn left at the first turn by an abandoned gas station. You will go by a Casey’s on the right and your old grandma’s house on the left. (Remember he hadn’t seen grandma’s house in 39 years.) Go a few blocks; the school will be on your left. Go past the Catholic Church and turn left on Fourth Street you can’t turn right or you will turn into the school. Go two blocks. You will see the Assembly of God Church. We are across the street with the purple door. I can’t imagine city slickers not being able to follow those directions. These city slickers wanted a house number and a street address. Can you imagine that?

My cousin from Albert Lea would have understood those directions since she was originally from Wells. Of course, with her I could have given her more details. I could have just told her that we live down the block from where the Johnsons lived and in the house that the Ruffings lived and she would have found the house.

Dinner went well except for … I had planned to impress everyone with cooking squash. I followed the directions everyone gave me only my oven obviously didn’t understand that it was supposed to cook the squash in one hour at 350 degrees. At the end of an hour it was still hard as a rock. We started dinner without squash.

My daughter-in-law saved me by asking me the question “Why didn’t you just cook it in the microwave like I do?”

I was trying to be impressive with my baking skills but I was desperate so I then followed her advice. So we had squash for dessert instead of dinner, but food is food, right?

Looking back on the weekend I realized my cousins and I had turned into my parents. When I was younger and company visited on a Sunday afternoon everyone would get in the car and we would take a drive. We would check out the countryside, visit our relatives in the cemetery and look at landmarks that had changed or that we remembered.

After dinner we loaded into my cousins van and we took a drive. We visited the cemetery where our grandparents were buried. We educated the Californians on the fact that soybeans dry up and don’t stay green and neither does corn. We visited the corner where my California cousin was playing cowboy on a visit in his youth. In the movies when the cowboy jumped off of the horse, the horse stopped.

We made sure he remembered jumping off the horse and the horse continuing on his way. My cousin remembers it differently than the rest of us. He claimed the horse was a mule and he jumped off to save himself from a near-death experience. We let him believe that since he obviously has repressed memories of that incident.

We were all given a gift that weekend. We could share memories that no one else would understand. My Albert Lea cousin said that it was nice talking about family with someone who knew what we were talking about.

Maybe I was too hasty selling my relatives on eBay. Maybe I should have tracked them down and made to get reacquainted. I used to know my first cousins, second cousins, third cousins and shirt tail relatives. Sundays were spent with these many relatives instead of at a shopping mall or a movie theater. There was richness to those days that I didn’t appreciate until now.

My children do not know their first cousins well. They do not know their extended cousin family because life and society has changed. We all seem to be too busy. We are so anxious to de-clutter our lives that we sell our relatives on eBay. We de-clutter relatives by not keeping in touch or visiting. We miss the richness these relatives could bring to our lives. They share our family. They share our history.

But I am old and perhaps it takes the years to appreciate that. Perhaps the Platters sang it best “Together at Last at Twilight Time.” In my Twilight Years I appreciate family reunions.

Wells resident Julie Seedorf’s column appears every Monday. Send e-mail to her at thecolumn@bevcomm.net or visit her blog at www.justalittlefluff.blogspot.com.

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