Cousin Reunion #1: The Saga Begins

This post marks the beginning of an epic blog journey. It is a blog journey of family ties and lost weekends. Of changing seasons and the rapid passage of time. Of mountains and molehills. Of mice and men.

Okay, it is really just a blog journey of one weekend, a weekend that I spent with my cousins and brothers. On my mother's side of the family, there are eleven cousins, and so there will be eleven posts on the subject of this cousin reunion. While this amount of detail may eventually prove too exhaustive for those of you who aren't related to me, market research conducted this weekend reveals that a large part of my readership is made up of my cousins. I'm just trying to play to my base.

Before we go too much further, let me present a crude family tree that will introduce you to the eleven people that inspire these 11 posts. I have written before about my grandmother Kink, who in turn had four children. Kink begat Anna Cay, Ken, Matt and Betsy. In turn, those people begat other children and those are the children we are concerned with:

Anna Cay begat Catharine, Worth and Mary Henry
Ken begat Elizabeth, Mary Ellison and Grant
Matt begat Allison and Sarah
Betsy begat Molly, George and William

Some of those people have gone forth and begat a whole other generation, and that generation is as cute and fun as the one that went before. But as I said, we only care about the 11 cousins. Those were the only people invited to the cousin reunion. No spouses, no kids, no parents.

But how did this cousin reunion come about? With 11 cousins scattered to the wind, living in random locations all over the world, we only come together somewhat sporadically. Weddings, mostly. Dinners when people are in the same town. Years ago, there were joint beach trips, but as my mom was the youngest sibling and didn't start her begatting til pretty late in the whole process, George, William and I have only hazy memories of those and then they stopped as well.

With so many of us and so few occasions to bring us together, you would think that perhaps we wouldn't know each other very well or even get along. The age of these people, after all, ranges from 21 to 40. And being one of the youngest cousins, I can tell you that the age difference seemed pretty big to me when I was a little kid. But as the years have passed, I think we have realized that we all genuinely like each other as people, and not just because we are related. That's just a lucky accident.

So to celebrate that lucky accident, the idea came about a few months ago to meet up and spend time with each other without a wedding or a funeral or some other family event hanging over our heads. Just the 11 of us for the whole weekend, for the first time ever. Even with 11 busy schedules and lives, we settled on a weekend and a place. Over the weekend of Oct 17-19, we gathered at Kanuga, an Episcopal conference center in the mountains of western North Carolina. We had two cabins right next to each other and all meals provided. The leaves were changing and the keg was flowing. We had a wonderful time.

But what specifically happened? Stay tuned for 10 additional entries to find out!