One of my cousins who is five years older than me came for a nice visit yesterday. We had a lovely chicken dinner, and lots of talking about family memories.

It's always good to talk to older cousins because many times we both experienced the same family things, but they had a different perspective, being that little bit older.

One thing we marveled at was how our parents and their siblings were all so adamant that we didn't want to know about our family tree. "What do you want to know that crap for?" my Aunt Irene asked me one time. And my mother: when I was in grade school I had an assignment to do a little family tree, and my mother refused to tell me anything. Mind you, she could have easily given me something related to my dad's family, but no, she flat refused to discuss it. Heck, she could have made something up that made us look like Beaver Cleaver's family. And there I was, going through the angst of not being able to complete a homework assignment.

Even after dishing all the dirt regarding my mom's generation that we could think of, we still couldn't come up with any skeletons in the family closet that were so horrible nobody could discuss them.

Unless it was that one outfit where the young gal was impregnated by the old guy, so he paid his son $500 to marry her, even though they weren't in love. After that, she had two kids by the guy she was married to, and then he died or left or something, so she had another child by the old guy, and then she had another by a sheepherder from Mexico who was a real nice guy, and then she had another one or two by another guy. And the last guy was the nicest to her, and she asked to have her grave be at the foot of his grave. "My grandpa was my daddy," is how one of her sons described it.

This woman was our great aunt, but I don't see what that has to do with a grade school assignment to do a family tree - that branch could easily be omitted and it'd still be a tree.



This is my cousin and his son many years ago.