Generations shift at family reunions

Family reunions are more than periodic opportunities to reunite with relatives you seldom see or barely know. Family reunions are also lessons in the steady advance of time. These events reveal truths we are reluctant to recognize, that we age into new roles without acknowledgement or intention. We become not only our parents but also our grandparents and great-grandparents.

In the past two months, I've attended reunions of my mother's and my father's families. My mother's family, comprising six siblings, was especially close-knit, it seemed to a youthful me. The five sisters and one brother, with all their children (a total of 13 grandchildren for my grandparents) gathered every Sunday afternoon at the home my grandfather built on a small farm after he retired from the cotton mill. While the adults sat and talked, my cousins and I had free run of the farm with its fields, pond and barn. At this year's reunion, only eight of the 13 cousins were still living, and not all of them attended the reunion.

My father's family seemed less adhered. The ten siblings scattered farther away from the mill village where all were raised. Some sought better jobs or followed ambitions or circumstance to distant places. One son, the youngest, never returned from World War II, though his brothers survived.

Now, when families gather, the remnants of my father's family seem closer and more eager to reunite. When I look around at either reunion, I see my contemporaries, my first cousins, and their children and grandchildren and realize that I am now where my grandparents were in my youth — elderly, a little insecure, and overjoyed, filled with gratitude, to see the children of our children. The old pictures we pass around show our parents in middle age or later, and we take pictures of our generation, at that same vulnerable age, distinguished from our parents primarily by this year's color photography, which contrasts with the black-and-white light and shadows of the old pictures. The faces are not so different. We, who once tugged on the pants and skirts of parents, now look down at the toddlers who have assumed our earlier roles, impatiently tugging for attention.

We are constantly teetering on that instability of being the playful kid, the cocky teenager, the ambitious, confident young adult, while also being the elderly, time-limited, slower, fading people we saw our parents become. Can we possibly be the same person? We don't recognize the bell curve of life until we are plummeting on the downward side, unable to stop it or slow it down.

Family gatherings, a generation apart

We are back from a three-day weekend at Beech Mountain with our three children, their spouses and our six grandchildren. It was a wonderful, relaxing time as we talked into the night with the adults and watched the children play together excitedly.

The experience made me think back to my own childhood when I was the age of those grandchildren, and my mother's five siblings and their children would gather every Sunday afternoon at my maternal grandparents' rural home. They were close, literally and figuratively. All but one of the siblings lived within 10 miles of the textile mill village where they all grew up and some still worked. The one distant sister was only 50 miles away. It's harder now for us to gather our children from more distant locales.

The comforting joy I felt at seeing all my children and grandchildren together made me wonder: When was the last time my parents had all their children together at once?

It must have been in 1961, when my oldest brother arrived by interstate bus from the Air Force base where he'd been posted and spent several days at home. A year later, our sister died at 17 in a car crash, and our parents would never see all of their five children together again. We survivors grew families of our own and gathered periodically at family reunions, when all could make the trip from our widely dispersed locations, or at Christmas, when, a few times, our parents packed three families into their modest farmhouse. They crammed 10 or 12 or 13 people into a house of no more than 1,200 square feet, some sleeping on the floor, because Christmas was when our parents wanted everyone to be together.

That family never gathered at resort locations — never at the beach or the mountains — but at the little house where we'd all grown up or at some church fellowship hall with ties to a family member. In the big reunions, where all my mother's or my father's siblings and their families would gather, there were no opportunities to gather quietly over morning coffee or an evening nightcap and talk and talk.

All the things my parents missed out on saddens me, knowing they loved their children and grandchildren as much as we love ours. But theirs was a different era, and their lives were broken by tragedies and great burdens. Still, I know they would have loved to have spent a long weekend surrounded by five children and 11 grandchildren (plus any my older sister might have added, had she lived longer).

I smile for my parents the smile they would have smiled if they had only experienced the joy we experienced last weekend, far from home and surrounded by generations who share our genes.