The three siblings, long since grown with grown children of their own, turn toward me as I walk into the living room.
“Remind us where you all fit,” they inquire politely, having known me all my life through occasional visits, but being shaky on the details.
“My mother’s mother’s father was Cyrus Darwin — Adelia’s brother,” I say, and they all nod.
To invoke Adelia Darwin Stout at this gathering is to slap a layer of mortar on the brick of your personal connection to the clan. “My maternal grandmother and your father are first cousins, so that makes us …”
Well, I don’t actually know what it makes us. “It makes us kin,” I finish, shrugging, and we all laugh.
We’re at the farm in Rhea County for a Saturday afternoon dinner, having just come from the family cemetery up behind the high school. The house is full of people and food and stories, all of them centered on the woman we’re here to remember, our connections to her and each other.
I was at work when my mother called. “Oh, Cousin Kathy died,” she said. “I’m going up Friday for the service in Sevierville, then to Rhea County for the burial on Saturday.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll take you. We’ll go together.”
When my mother settled our Army family here in 1989, she chose the place largely because it’s smack in the middle of her family history. She grew up visiting her mother’s Tennessee cousins, and they often came south to see her and her family in Florida.
Cousin Kathy was the formidable mastermind behind the Old Mill in Pigeon Forge, Tenn. She and her husband Bob grew it from nothing and spent 47 years running the place, employing dozens of nieces and nephews on both sides of the family at the booming attraction through the decades.
The cousins came from all over the country to work summers at the mill. They called it the Old Mill Boot Camp, and the legends abound — short-sheeted beds, unauthorized long-distance phone bills, a surreptitiously consumed bottle of champagne that turned out to be a keepsake from Richard Nixon’s inauguration.
Throughout the weekend, they remembered and laughed and marveled at the passage of years. They’re everywhere now — Seattle and Detroit and Denver and Knoxville and a dozen other places. But they came home, and they all spent the days talking about their shared history and blood. Over plates of barbecue and homemade desserts, they parsed family connections in detail, laughed together at recollections of Kathy’s propensity never to let the facts get in the way of a good story.
“You have to bring your boys up to see me soon,” said Caroline, Kathy’s younger sister and lifelong best friend.
She’s absolutely right, I thought, looking around the table at the extended family I so rarely see. The last time I came for Memorial Day at the family cemetery, my 14-year-old son was a very little boy. The last time I was at this farm, I was a college student.
“I’ll bring them,” I promised.
And I will. But I sure wish I hadn’t waited so long to make sure my sons know where we all fit.
Contact Mary Fortune at thirtytensomething.blogspot.com.