2024/5 COUSINS

The night we all went to Johnny's LOVE LETTERS pop up museum in SLC.

Most of us store insta-memories on our cell phones. They are most easily found in the Photos app. I have an over-abundance of memories there. But I also have them in my Voice Memos. Way back ones. Hundreds of them. Bits of songs, song ideas, talks and stories and weird chords I don’t know how to name but can recognize by their sound. I can retrieve the sound of people I love who are gone now. I can even tell how my own voice is changing through the years. Technology can be awesome! Once I recorded common sounds around our house, like cupboard doors closing, water running at the kitchen sink, the doorbell ringing, the garage door shutting. I did this for Kate who lives in New York and was missing home. There’s also a grand recording of our large clan humming Christmas carols on kazoos after Thanksgiving dinner.

I have a snippet of what our house sounds like during Sunday family dinner. We gather here every other Sunday to feast on and with each other. It can get pretty chaotic. Our family circle stretches beyond bloodlines. Sometimes someone will come who is not used to a big family that is comfortable with each other and also comfortable with chaos. I find the cacophony beautiful, to the point that I pressed record on my phone so I could keep it.

The source of most of that noise, besides multiple conversations at one of at least three dinner tables (we usually have between 25 and 35 people) is the enthusiasm of young cousins when they see each other. Frankly I cook, clean, set tables, do dishes and laundry for these dinners mostly because I want those cousins to have, somewhere deep in their memory banks, a place where they felt the warmth, candor and creative safety of each other. 

Cousins opening pjs and Nerf guns the Sunday before Christmas

My own cousins were pivotal in my life. My mom was the tenth of eleven children (Fred, Parks, Ruth, Ruby, Edna, Mary, Mae, Afton, Becky - (and Daniel and Marion who both passed away in childhood). I was next-to-the-youngest of the next-to-the-youngest and there were no cousins my age, but my Aunt Becky had a whole passel of kids close to my age and they became my safe place. Our trips to Idaho in the summer ended up most happily at their little house in Ucon. Their family already filled that house to bulging, but My Aunt Becky and Uncle Richard shifted everyone over to make room for us. I’ve never slept so happily on the floor or a couch. It was the sleep of home, the kind of home that was a feeling rather than a place.

I’ve noticed that time does interesting things in blood relationships. Cousins go through the funk of teenage compartmentalization. Some cousins stop their intimate conversations. The same kids who played pretend wholeheartedly together as littles end up eating dinner rather silently beside each other. Its kind of heartbreaking for a grandma. But then I’ve seen the beautiful unfolding of age, when the social blinds are lifted, the muscle memory kicks in and the heart returns home. My own kids find delight and comfort in their cousins who are also adults now. It makes my heart so happy.

Annie and her cousin Lauren reunite as adults.

Last summer Dave’s cousins, whom we see during our cottage visits in Michigan, told about the time the boy cousins were playing on the third floor of the Mackinac Island cottage. The girls were playing on the second story balcony (this was a magnificently large Victorian cottage on the west bluff of Mackinac Island).  Apparently the boys, in their eternal quest to tease the girls, stuffed some of cousin Roy’s clothing and threw the dummy over the balcony. The girls, terrorized at the thought of their cousin falling to his death, ran screaming down the staircase, stunning Grandma and Grandpa. The boys had a good old laugh about it, and in the process sealed both their relationships with each other, and frankly sealed the girls' relationships together as well. Shared shenanigans will do that.

Grandma & Grandpa Roy
at the Mackinac Island cottage.
that top balcony to the left is 
where the boys threw "Roy" over.

This fall my cousin Gail had some of us up to her cabin near the Teton mountains. It was beautiful in every way; fishing, mountain air, guitars ringing into the night, games and meals and old photos and stories retold. It felt like our moms were pulling threads from Heaven and cinching us together repeatedly. Goodness, I love my cousins.

A collection of Miskin and Hansen cousins.

As tired as I am Sunday night, after cooking dinner for the masses, setting and serving, running the dishwasher twice and rearranging the furniture back into a family room, I love our Sunday gatherings. I would gladly run myself ragged just to know I might one day peek over the edge of Heaven and see my posterity retelling family stories or playing kazoos in unison after an autumnal feast.

Connors cousins with their Auntie Kate.
(At John's Love Letters museum)

WOTD 10 - COUSIN

Christopher sat beside me Wednesday night at our Young Women’s activity. The girls had invited their younger siblings to come, a follow-up opportunity from our Sunday lesson on strengthening family ties. Jess brought her 9 year old brother Chris. I chatted with him while he painted a little wooden box with his 18 year old sister. We talked about random things, nothing of much consequence really. Jess mentioned that they had been looking at the video their parents had made of Christopher’s early years (as if he were not still in them).

“I never realized,” Chris said as he smoothed BYU blue paint across the top of his box, “how wrinkly little babies are. And they have this long grey wrinkly tube coming out of their bellies.” He scrunched his face. “Ewww.”

“That’s your umbilical cord Bud. We all had them. That’s where our belly buttons are now.”

I was about to explain how blood and nutrients passed from mother to baby, but thought better of it, knowing there were other kids a the table and thinking maybe we should lighten the topic.

All those cords, connecting us to our mothers, and them to their mothers, and so on. Like stitches in a seam. As independent as we like to think ourselves, no one is completely of their own making. All we have to do is poke that little divot in our tummies to be reminded of that. We carry the blood of our mothers, who carry the blood of their mothers.

Is it plasma or some other sort of blood that makes cousins…cousins? As far as I know there is not proof that a certain aspect of a person’s blood makes for a certain character trait. It could be true, I’ve just never heard about it. Nonetheless, there are definite aspects of my personality that run right along the same railroad track as my cousins. Things we do, things we say, even mannerisms that mimic each other, even if we are from different generations and sometimes even if we never really knew each other.

Since our mom was the next to youngest in her large family, and I was the tail end of her passel of kids, we really only had one chunk of cousins that were anywhere near my age. In fact I don’t think I have one cousin my same age. We didn’t know the cousins on our dad’s side, except for Sandra and Nancy. And we never saw them at all after my elementary school years since Dad left for good. But those Miskin cousins there in that little brick house in Ucon, Idaho were treasures to me. Pure treasures. First of all my Aunt Becky was pretty much the kind of person I wanted to be. She was creative and witty and spiritual and hard working and fun. She didn’t over-fuss about things, but we all had our chores to do. It made me feel like I belonged when I got my chore assignments along with the cousins when we visited in the summers.

My Miskin cousins were older than I, at least until Michelle was born and the second batch of Miskin kids came along. Not by a lot, but just old enough to make me want to be just like them. All girls: DeAnn, Gail, Jane and Mary Lou. They were bonafide teenagers, with long straight hair and make up and real bra’s and everything! They had jobs, and dates, and purses that had real money in them, too. In the afternoons, when our chores were done, we’d pump up the hi fi stereo and let Carole King thump out the opening beats of her brand new LP, Tapestry ... “I feel the earth ! Move! Under my feet. I feel the sky tum-buh-lin’ down. I feel my heart start a-trem-buh-lin’ when-eh-vuh you’re arou-ou-ou-ound.” Oh my gosh, that brings back so many brain pictures and little zingy feeling sparklers! To this day I use Carole King’s Tapestry album to motivate me to clean. (I don’t play it all that often, obviously.)

On hot summer nights we slept under the stars, on the grass in the back yard. We’d wait till the lights were out in the house and then unzip our sleeping bags, tiptoeing past Uncle Richard’s window, hunched in silence as we scurried to the road, then made our way out to Tucker’s farm for a rendezvous of the most wholesome variety. Night games of Duck Duck Goose in the freshly mown hay. Looking back I don’t really know how much of my memory bank is conjecture and how much was real. And of the real, I’m not sure how much of it actually occurred in sequence or if it got scrunched together like costumes in my imaginary family cedar chest. Doesn’t matter. What I take from it now is a tender place in my heart for those daughters of my cherished Aunt Becky; all of them grandmothers now. Cousins who lived far away became stitched to our hearts, in long untidy basting stitches, by these memory packed visits. I remember vividly pulling onto the highway, the little Idaho town of Ucon in our rear view mirror, knowing the town we called home, so far away in the east, had no such creatures anywhere near our house or apartment. I ached to turn around, to plant myself closer to the people who bore my blood, to breathe that Idaho air into my lungs in a season other than summer.

I watch my grandkids interact with each other now: see how thrilled Timo and Sophie are when they see each other. I’m conscious of how pivotal their time together can be. I take Parker and Anna Bella and tie their aprons on, lifting them onto the black counter stools, handing them rubber spatulas and measuring spoons. They each crack an egg, dropping them into the bowl before us. “Gummy, can I do the sugar?” Anna asks, “and Parker can do the flour?” We all agree. Little pre-school hands hold the beaters when we’re done, their tiny tongues wiggling in search of a smidgen of batter.

“Can we go play now?” They scurry off their perches, I untie their aprons, and they are off searching for some new adventure. They are young. Too young to have solid memories form like photographs in a pool of liquid developer. They won’t store these particulars in their minds, unless we take pictures and show them to them down the road. But they will sense, somehow, that something is different with these people. Something binding, even if personalities are not particularly aligned in the end. There was this time when blood flowed from their mom’s to them, and from Gummy to their parents, like the blood flowed from my mother to me and her mother to her.

There is no escaping it. Blessedly, wonderfully, gratefully, there is no escaping it. We are bound. We are cousins.