Extended family

I’m looking at pictures hung on the wall of our family room and one in particular has awakened my imagination. It’s one of those posed shots of everyone who happened to attend this particular family gathering - my cousin Sue’s wedding. We’re standing in careful ranks so that all the smiling faces are exposed to the camera.

I know all these people. I played with some of them as a kid and some of them played with my daughters when they were kids. The common thread runs through one person. Everyone in the photo is descended from my grandmother.

She was quite a presence in my young life. All of the cousins in my rung of the family have strong memories of pot lucks out on her patio, breakfast in the little yellow room off the kitchen, sleeping in the room off the porch, giggling at private jokes while the adults played cards in the dining room.

Many of my childhood memories revolve around the relationships represented in this one photo. And a foot away from it is a similar photo of Mary’s extended family, spreading across the lawn to left and right of their family matriarch. I suppose most families have a photo like this.

Some don’t, of course.

I won’t go back into the whole nature vs. nurture argument. But it does seem to me that a great deal of who I am now can be divined from studying this photo. As is true of Mary and the folks in her family team photo.

I feel a great deal of sympathy for folks who don’t have one of these photos on their family room wall. Growing up in a family that chooses to continue to come together over the years to mark the way posts of our collective lives must have something to do with the sense of belonging and self-worth that got me through down times.

Every child deserves to grow up in a family like this. Which is not to say that small families and single-child homes can’t produce wonderful human beings. Or that all large families produce only Nobel Prize winners.  But I’m thankful for the family in which I grew up – brother and sisters, my parents, uncles and aunts and of course, Grandma K.

Mary Fitzgerald Kersting was not a scientist or a politician or an entertainer. Few people outside our family would likely recall her today. But for me, my grandmother and the other folks descended from her formed the framework of my life.

She is long gone but certainly not forgotten. Not by me and not by anyone in that picture.