Family: Love 'em, hate 'em -- we're all connected

They can be frustrating, aggravating, irritating. They can be funny, loving, interesting. They can be different shapes and sizes. They can be devious, hypocritical, selfish. You can look just like them, remember stuff that they remember too, and share personality traits.

They're family.

I spent a day with my three aunties and three cousins this week in a spur-of-the-moment mini-reunion. We'd had a first-time, big family reunion five years ago with around 55 of us attending, including five of the six siblings (my mother wasn't able to travel), out of some 70 cousins and families. Not many of us live near each other -- we're spread mostly in the West, with a sprinkling in other parts of the country, and it was fun to see my cousins with their families, some of whom I'd not seen since they were small.

But this week was more fun. And a little sad. When I hugged my oldest aunt, she cried for my mother, and I did too. I see Mom in each of her sisters -- the nose in one, the eyes in another, the smile in a couple of them. My cousins all look different, although each of us has a few characteristics of our parents. But we share many memories.

We spent the afternoon looking through photo albums and scrapbooks from the reunion, laughing at the BIG hair of the '60s and '70s, remembering trips and holidays when we were together, seeing our parents at younger ages. It was good to connect like that, to remember.

We cousins are in the late 40s-to-early-60s age -- the up and coming matriarchs of the family. Three of us have lost a parent; I've lost both. We have children who are grown; one is still raising children at home. We've had health issues. Our mothers and grandmother have osteoporosis, and we check with each other, a little anxiously, about our bone density tests. We have or had parents whose health is failing, and we share that, silently, but it's there.

It is a connectedness that doesn't exist in any other relationship -- not with friends, siblings, parents, spouses.

We don't wholly agree with each other politically or spiritually, not that it was discussed in this reunion, but I know that from letters and previous discussions. We don't really *know* each other, not in our day-t0-day lives like our local friends and immediate family do, and I'm not sure we'd be best friends if we weren't relatives. Our personal styles are very different. Our careers have led us on separate paths. And it didn't matter, at least this day.

We each fix special breakfasts with bacon and wild rice, just like we ate at our grandparents' in Duluth, Minn. We know what lutefisk is, and remember our parents drinking Tom and Jerrys at Christmas. We remember our grandmother's beautiful flower beds, and our grandfather's way of gentling any animal.

Despite our distances and differences, we are connected. And I am grateful.