I am preparing for a family reunion for my father’s side of the family. I’ve been creating a family tree scrapbook.  This scrapbook includes photos for every step, adopted, in-law and outlaw of our group.  I scoured Facebook for hours; I hounded cousins to drag out their old picture boxes – doesn’t everyone have one?   

Of course, during this project, I thought I was upgrading my computer and ugh!  One wouldn’t print, one wouldn’t get emails and only another one could use a graphics program that I have used since 1998 and am not willing to give up!   I had to print on one, get emails on another one and prepare graphics on yet a third!   My husband got so tired of my constant whining about my computer issues, (and then attempting to set up a blog, oh, my gosh!) that he bought me a desktop.  Fast as lightening!  He got almost everything installed and moved over, and the hard disc died.  Boat anchor!            Thank goodness, we had purchased it from the seller of all things, Amazon, and they took it back and sent us another one.  He had it working lickety split.  It has been great!  I finished the framed family tree poster and prepared a notebook with the family tree and DNA results from Ancestry.com.  It is amazing the amount of information that is available at one’s fingertips about where we came from and to whom we are kin!  I think I have 14,000 or so cousins – fifty times removed, and I would love to get to know everyone of them! 

There were twenty genetically related of we first cousins, sadly we have lost 4 – all young men.  We had twenty-six genetically related second cousins, but we have lost three.  There are twenty-four of the genetically related third cousins.   Then many of these have spouses, too! We are also happily expecting some of the step and adopted kin.  That’s a mess of folks!  We are expecting between 50-60 kin at the reunion and wish more would come. 

            Joseph has been working tirelessly (when he wasn’t trying to solve my computer problems), getting the house, patio and driveway pressure washed, the windows washed, the grass mowed.   We have lots of grass.  It takes him about 4 hours to mow just around our house and he has a big mower.  With all this rain we have been having, he must do it often.  Then he bush hogs the pasture and behind the pond, weed eats and edges.   He does all this in between repairing and painting old furniture for the new screened -in-porch, and helping me decorate, and   look for just the right plants for the porch!   He is determined that it is going to be perfect when all these kin roll up.  I’m telling you this man is a keeper!   He is even smoking 4 Boston butts for pulled pork for the reunion, along with several other meats.  I love to prepare the food for parties.  I like to make sure that we have all the sides that I like! 

During the digging around in our family history, I remembered stories about some of my relatives and I want to share a few of them with you during these next few days as we prepare for this fabulous event.  I am using only a letter to represent these favorite people because I would not want to upset any one of the survivors about their families.    

Aunt O was an interesting woman.   She was the third of nine children.  She was very sweet – with an overbite to write home about.  I remember that Aunt O was an old maid.  Well, that’s not exactly true.  She married a widowed Church of God Reverend called Doc.  He had several children that Aunt O took on to raise.  One son, Virgil, is the only one whose name I can remember – and that is because there was a movie out in the 50’s with Tommy Sands (Virgil) called Sing Boy Sing about a preacher’s son who became the king of rock and roll.  Well, Doc died after a truly short marriage, leaving Aunt O a widow with all these stepchildren.  Per his wishes, they were placed in a Church of God Orphanage.   I know that she did not have the means to support a passle of kids, but she loved them, and it broke her heart to give them up.  She spoke many times about the fact that the times with them was the happiest time of her life before her later years, after her son was born. 

She was a widow, living with my grandparents, Pa and Ma in Enterprise AL while she worked at the Cotton Mill there. She liked flowers and was always repotting or fussing with her plants. I remember one incident when she was dividing a plant, a large earthworm came out of the soil.  I screamed and that was the day that I learned that earthworms were good for the plants and that they were not going to eat me!  I was about 4 years old.

A year or two later, my dad and my sweet stepmother (Mama) moved to “south Florida” as they called it – Lakeland FL.  They moved there before I started to school and took me with them.  Aunt O tagged along – all looking for the American Dream.  

Daddy worked at a plant nursery, and Mama worked at a sewing factory, (that’s the type of work she did in Alabama), but I am not sure my memory holds true.  Mama’s parents, my step-grandfather (Big Daddy) and step-grandmother (Big Mama) had moved down there earlier in search of a better life. They were both very uneducated and naïve; however, they did have a much better life than they had in AL.  He was a greens keeper at a large golf course, and she peeled fruit for Kraft.  They were happy to have their eldest daughter nearer them.

I was scared to death because Aunt O told me she had seen people’s arms rot off after having smallpox shots.  Smallpox shots were mandatory immunizations in FL, but not AL.  I remember Aunt O having a screaming fit with my parents because I wanted to go back home to Ma and not have my arm rot off.  That was the beginning of big time downhill for my dad.  I had lived with my paternal grandparents, Ma and Pa, after my mother’s death when I was 7 months old.  By moving to FL, I was ripped from the arms of Ma, who had essentially been my mother since I was an infant.  Daddy dropped his candy in the dirt when he acquiesced to move back to AL instead of making me behave and stop running the show. 

He never found the American Dream after we moved back to Alabama, and I continued to live with Ma, Pa, and Aunt O when I started school in 1953.  And spoiled I WAS NOT!  (If you believe that, well, we will leave it at that.) Ma was very old-timey, wore old timey clothes and shoes, dipped snuff, and was book-educated only through the second grade.   I was socially and culturally awkward and although I was not “with it,” I had enough “smarts” to know that Ma would not be the typical “Mom” going to the schoolhouse on the first day of school.    I was afraid I would be embarrassed by her old-timey ways.  I begged Aunt O to take me that day.  She did, and you know, I have thought about it many times.  I have such regret that I thought my sweet Ma, who at the ripe old age of fifty, took me to raise– after having raised eight of her own- might not be “good enough” to mix and mingle with the other parents. 

Aunt O’s foray in to extended widowhood was squelched when she moved to North AL to live with her brother, D, and his wife H.  Uncle D had gotten a decent job in the steel mills in Tuscaloosa and Aunt H was a nurse.  Uncle D’s family attended the Church of God in Northport AL.  My Dad always said that they followed those damn T’s (another church family) up there and left all the “care-taking” of Ma and Pa to him – another story for another day.  Low and behold, Aunt O hooked up with another widower, S S.  He was old and ugly and drove a Studebaker.  That’s a little too many ss’s for me.

S S had three children; I think.  I remember N, she was only 5-8 years older than me, but I cannot remember the other grown children’s names.  None of us had any inkling that Aunt O could be having sex with that ugly old man, but, eureka, she turns up pregnant.

A son, P, was born.  He was a handsome young man but led a troubled life.  Aunt O loved him so much – he truly was the “apple of her eye.”  P was into drugs and came to my house in Ozark AL once – in the middle of the night – paranoid about “some bad men are after me.”  It was a scary night.  Let’s not digress too much.

 I remember that Aunt O always had a green salad at every meal (except breakfast, of, course.)  We never had green salad at Ma’s house. She always loved to feed everyone!  I was visiting her during the summer once when I was about 10-11 years old.  I have always been a night owl and hard to awaken in the morning.  My bio clock wants to go to bed at 2 AM and arise at 11 AM.  P was several years younger than I.  One morning, he was bright and anxious for me to get out of bed.  He got on the bed and tried to open the venetian blinds and whomp. The whole mess (real metal ones – not the gentle plastic of today!) fell on my head and broke my nose – and my nose is still crooked.

S S eventually died in 1979 and Aunt O and her son lived together for several years.   She eventually moved into a retirement community apartment and gave P the family home.   She was always short of money and every now and then she would go down to Ma’s in Elba to “save up some money.”

She passed away in 1991 on the 4^th of July.  She was truly one of the “good ones.”