A family reunites, briefly

On Saturday, there were about a second-helping dozen of us, all brought together by the bonds of family and memory. We are the remaining grandchildren of William Wiley and Katie McInnis Tarleton, remnants of 34 (as best we could count) first cousins. We gathered for a few hours at a historic country inn a short drive from where our grandparents lived and from where many of us were born.

The first generation from that 1900 marriage have all died. Only two former wives of the Tarleton brothers still live. The last brother died nearly a decade ago.

Reunions of this family were annual events throughout the memory of most of my generation, though many of the cousins were too scattered or too busy with life to attend the reunions and get reacquainted with our cousins and meet those cousins' children and grandchildren. My generation, the grandchildren of Katie and Wiley, spanned about 20 years. My oldest first cousins are two decades older than I. Our grandparents' firstborn was born more than 20 years before their youngest, so two generations of this family take up a lot of space on a timeline.

We gathered Saturday to enjoy a meal together and to tell stories — reminders of what the generations before us were like, what they did, and the stories they told. We also remembered our own generation and the generation or two that have come after us.

These cousins have endured mourning, each of us losing parents and many losing siblings and even children. Those lives could be remembered without wailing, although grief never dies, as we laughed at the stories of our lives and our parents' lives and our grandparents' lives.

The stories are important. We pass them to our children, embellished perhaps, misremembered perhaps, but essential for establishing who we are, whence we came, where we are going.

Family reunions cling to memories

Each year we gather, descendants of a couple married on the cusp of the 20th century. He had never known his grandfather, a Confederate infantryman killed in battle. A small woman of proud Scot-Irish descent, she would bear 10 children. He had been among the great migration in the emerging South of landless farmers who had surrendered to what they called "public work" in the cotton mills in the late-19th and early 20th century. His eldest daughter told me once that "Poppa always thought the grass was greener just over the hill," and he moved the family often in search of better soil before he surrendered to working for wages. Most of their children would follow that migration into the mills, where the work was hard and hazardous and conditions were harsh. Hard times made them harder workers appreciative of any job that came with a regular paycheck. For them, "smart" meant diligence and industriousness, not intellectual talent.

Their whole generation is gone now, and the annual telling of stories about mill village shenanigans and about their parents, which had been the entertainment at family reunions, has been silenced. Still, we gather, widely dispersed first cousins trying to kindle the spark of memory of those 10 siblings and their parents. We strain to reconnect juvenile relationships that are as foggy as a dream, to connect faces to decades-old memories. We recount the recent events of our lives — deaths, illnesses, weddings, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A few of the next generation — the great-grandchildren of my grandparents — and the next generation after that wander through the crowd like visitors to a foreign land, unfamiliar with the history, the language and the culture. With few exceptions, we will not see each other for another year when this gathering occurs again.

Still, we gather, stirring the embers of shared memory and genetics. For a few hours, the embers flicker to life, dance into flame and give off heat. We warm our cool and modern selves in that glow of century-old kindredness, a connection of blood and shared memory kept faintly aglow in the simple effort of an annual family reunion until that day comes when this generation, too, shall pass into memory.