Family Tree
Here we are, another morning, in another day. Yesterday was a good day. I had lunch and a long visit with two second cousins, their father, and a first cousin once removed. It’s nice still being in touch with people with whom I’ve had such long relationships, with active memories of their parents and the parents of their parents. In fact, we’re still troding the ground we trod as children, from San Antonio to Johnson City, a nice nexus. And most of those who have gone before are in the ground just down the road from where I live. And the living sometimes call on me when they come to visit their departed kin.
I guess that’s how families stay alive, or at least the memory of families. I think at some point however that mighty nexus might spin apart as the branches of the family tree spread further and further from the trunk and get grafted on to other families in other areas and the pull of those families become central to other lives with other mothers and other grandmothers. It has happened to us, as I’ve watched the lives of my late wife’s family dim and vanish until there are only threads left, children here and there.
I’ve done my best to show my kids from whence they came to let them know who did what did and when. Who fought in what wars. Who lived. Who died. I know for me, as a child of the road and traveler around the country, this family in Johnson City and San Antonio was the core of my existence, the permanence I didn’t have as a youth. The thing to which I could always return. And even now as the lights of my contemporaries wink out, it gives me comfort to know that when I go, I’ll be lying beside those who made it all possible in the first place. Home. Full circle.