The Madcap Cousins

A couple of years ago a branch of my family had a reunion.  You see, that side of the family had been estranged since my childhood.  My Dad had a difficult time staying on good terms with his sisters.  He was a person who took things to heart much too readily and forgave begrudgingly.  This made it very difficult to keep the family together.  The end result was that I hadn’t seen these cousins in decades.

I think my appearance was rather surprising to them considering our parents’ bumpy history.  Truth be told, none of us could remember what caused the last rift of many.  At any rate, I was really happy to reunite with my own flesh and blood.

Four of us decided to meet for lunch to share pictures and stories. If you look at the pic above, you will see Maggie, me, Issy, and Helen.  Come to find out, my cousin Helen wanted to know where our grandparents were buried.  Maggie and Issy didn’t know, but I did!  Off we went in search of our ancestors.

In spite of the fact that I hadn’t been there in decades, I was able to locate the graves fairly quickly.  As luck would have it, those graves were right near the road and the four of us gathered there and started to tell family stories.  Some of these stories were hilarious and we were having a great time chuckling together.  Then we observed that as the cars were going by, people were staring at us.

It’s not often that you see people standing in a graveyard giggling!  Once that realization hit us, we couldn’t help it, we started to laugh uproariously and that made the reactions of the passing motorists even worse!  We decided that the four of us would stay in touch and get together on a regular basis.  We dubbed ourselves The Madcap Cousins, and I’m sure we have many adventures ahead of us.

I’m not sure what my Dad would have thought about us all getting together.  I like to think that he was right there laughing along with us.  He had a wicked sense of humor and I think he would have fit right in.