Yesterday I received a call from Gertrude McDonald, who is my first cousin once removed on my mother’s side. It had probably been three or four years since we’d talked; but, as with most of the McDonalds, you can pick it up where you laid it down. Time is not a thief of affection.
We chatted close to an hour, recalling family members who have gone to the great reunion in the sky, laughing at their former idiosyncrasies, and catching each other up on family members who are still Earth-bound.
It will likely be months and maybe years before we talk again. But that doesn’t matter. There is an invisible bond between us, created over almost twenty years when my own mother made an annual trek– no, pilgrimage — from Arkansas to upstate New York to spend time with family members, like my cousin Gertrude, who never ventured further than Lewis County, NY, where our forbearers settled over one hundred fifty years ago.
Before my mother started visiting each year, my grandmother did the same after she was widowed. Every summer, she drove east from Colorado, where she eventually settled for her later years, to spend the long June and July days with her sisters and sisters-in law and other various relatives with whom she had grown up, become an adult, and married my grandfather, also a local boy of Lewis County.
Now Lowville, NY, in the heart of Lewis County, is where my grandmother and my mother and their respective spouses rest in peace. It is where my roots began, even though I never lived there. But the McDonalds were a prolific clan, so even today with many of my direct descendants sleeping on what we call Tug Hill, there are equally as many cousins to carry the legacy. When I talk with one of them, like Gertrude, even if years pass in between those conversations, I feel as if I’m home.
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