I wedged the car between two pick-ups and took a final look at the invitation.
All these years, and she’s hardly changed ...
I opened the door and laughter spilled out of the Fellowship Hall. It was the sound of a celebration.
A familiar smile greeted us as we stepped inside: “Thanks for coming,” my cousin Bruce said.
His handshake was firm and sincere.
“We wouldn’t have missed it,” I said. It’s not every day Aunt Carole turns 90.
The invitation had arrived six weeks earlier. “I’d really like to go to this,” I told Carla. We’d missed too many of them in the past.
If life came with “do-overs,” I’d spend more time getting to know my family.
My cousin Brad saw us at the door and stepped away from the group he’d been talking to. Brad has an easy smile that seemed to widen at the thought that we’d made the trip.
These were the same cousins I sat with at “the kids table” when we went to Grandma’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.
Today, they’ve got grandchildren. In college.
“It’s nice to get together for something other than a funeral,” Brad said. It was bittersweet and true.
My cousins Linda and Barbara saw us waiting to greet Aunt Carole and crossed the room to welcome us. Barbara was “Barbara Jean” when I was little, and one of my earliest memories involves riding a horse on the farm where she grew up.
When I was 5, I kind of had a crush on her. Barbara Jean, not the horse.
We wished Aunt Carole a happy birthday, posed for pictures and gave her the Reader’s Digest version of our lives, then over plates of ham sandwiches and potato salad, cousin Brad brought us up-to-date on the latest family news.
But too soon we had to make the round of relatives to say our farewells, adding the obligatory and mostly unfulfilled promise to “do it again sometime soon.”
The drive home brought a stop to visit Aunt Gladys at the assisted living complex where she lives. Gladys is 98 and looks and sounds so much like her little sister -- my mom -- that it makes me smile and stings my eyes at the same time.
For the second time that day, we left with a promise to do it again soon.
Home was still three hours away when I said what I always say after these reunions: “It would have been fun to grow up with them.”
But as John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans."
We had today, and that’s what matters. A day spent with family.
And family is everything.
Dan Conradt, a lifelong Mower County resident, lives in Austin with his wife, Carla Johnson.
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