Well, the family reunion is over. It is hard to believe, all those months of planning, digging up addresses, sending out info letters, designing the tree, preparing a spreadsheet for research, getting DNA records from Ancestry.com, digging in the old picture boxes and albums, getting photos emailed and texted to me, trying to figure how to turn a HEIC photo into something I can use, stealing photos from Facebook, preparing the fattest family photo album on earth which included every single member of the family, whether natural, adopted or step! Having the piano tuned, finding, and wrapping twenty-five door prizes, pressure washing the house, washing all the porch chair cousins, edging the sidewalk and driveway, putting finishing touches on the new screened in porch, ordering the huge inflatable water slide for the kids, buying paper plates, cups, forks, napkins, and groceries. Setting up ten tables, two tents and 60 chairs, pulling in a flatbed trailer for photo ops, putting up the 20’ long Cook’s Family Reunion Banner and a tent sign on the highway directing everyone here, making 15 salads, a foot tall coconut cake, tea cakes , double batch of banana pudding, smoking pork for 15 hours, chopping it, boiling 5 gallons of peanuts… and then it’s over. Only the crumbs and garbage sacks are left. Not even a boiled peanut to my name!

But the joy on the faces of cousins who had not seen each other in years was worth every moment of planning and work! There were fifty-nine of us all together, but fourteen of us first cousins were the most joyful! And Aunt Pauline, do not forget her. She is the only one of the original brothers and sisters left and she was grinning from ear to ear. We had lost a total of four first cousins and two second cousins and our last reunion was twenty-one years ago! That is too long. We also missed one who was ill and one who lives in England part of the year – and now is the time she is away. Other than that, all the first cousins were here. Many of the next generation were here, too.

We took pictures, we talked, we laughed, we looked at the picture book, we ate, and we sang, oh, how we sang. This is a singing bunch of folks! Cousin Martha can play the piano like Liberace and could play any gospel song the others wanted to sing. We had a quartet and a soloist from one family, three soloists from another family and a duet from yet another – and several more who were too shy to show off!

I hope that each one here was blessed as much as I was. I was so blessed, that since I had all the borrowed folding tables, I would have the world’s biggest yard sale two weekends later! We have crawled around in the attic space of the barn, perused the contents of every shelf – even reorganized a little. We have junk that we took with us from the Ark, the Mayflower and the last five moving companies! There is more stuff here than anyone should be allowed to have – and this is just a SMALL part of the junk we have accumulated all these years. Joseph and I both have hobbies- model airplane building and flying, woodworking, gunsmithing, general farm maintenance, paper crafting, glass flower making, machine embroidery, cross stitch, and shopping. (I have found that I actually like to shop more than I like to do crafts! Maybe that’s part of our problem.)

In addition to the collections, we have accumulated over the years, I am going out of business with the little thrift shop I have at Michael’s Consignments. My dear and absolutely crazy friend (for volunteering for the bugs, spiderwebs and dust) Pat, helped me pack up every smidgen of the detritus that I had collected and stored in that place for 5 years. There was everything from Iranian shoe racks to Valentine jackets. There was dishes, pots and pans, china, crystal, flatware, jewelry, picture frames (oh, my, were there ever picture frames). We have everything corralled in the barn for ready evacuation to the front-line Thursday afternoon.

And on top of the family reunion, the yard sale and insanity, my beloved granddaughter is coming for a drive by hugging Wednesday night and Thursday morning. We have not seen her for over a year due to this and that travel by us both and I cannot bear the idea of her getting into the dust and spider webs for such a brief period! If she were going to be here very long, I’d put her to work, too!

There is a little side story about the volume of picture frames I have collected. While I lived in Texas, I loved to participate in fall craft shows. I started making shadowboxes by constructing a wooden box to fit a pretty frame and then fill it up with scenes of Christmas. They were extremely popular in Texas, and I could sell them for a fair price, so I went on a binge collecting large picture frames from every thrift store in the massive Dallas area. Then we moved to Alabama and the customer base changed wildly. You could not even give those things away. So, alas, I have three large moving boxes full of frames and boxes and a crate or two of whimsical things to go in them. I must get creative and figure out something to do with all the whimsical things, because they are brand new!

So, another side story – I started collecting denim jackets of all sizes with the wild idea that I would embroider them and sell them in the shop. Well, they are still in the suitcase where they were initially stored, so expect an onslaught of un-embroidered denim at that yard sale!

A third side story, I started collecting dishes to make flowers for my fence.  This mushroomed into quite a collection.  A few of these dishes still linger and long for a place in the yard sale. 

After this hopefully terribly busy weekend, we will return the borrowed family reunion tables. Then I will mail out the embarrassingly unprofessional family reunion books that Snapfish and I created. (It will have a few unwanted lines in places where lines were unnecessary and unneeded.) And it will finally be over. I will pass along the 20-foot-long banner to the next Family Reunion Giver and hope I live to see it.