Different Flowers from the Same Garden
Once upon a time there was a lovely fence that encased the yard here at the old homestead. My Grandfather John built it shortly before he died. Sadly all that remains are the crumbling stone corner posts and the tilting concrete support walls. I have been urged by some to have that “eyesore” removed and buried but that old wall holds a vestige of my childhood that I’m not ready to discard. On it can be found various hand prints with names and dates. They belong to me and my Chehaski Cousins.
As my Grandfather painstakingly erected that fence in the last summer of his life, he had each of us press our hands into the fresh wet concrete. Then our name and our age was scratched beside it. A couple of years ago, I, and two of those cousins strolled around the yard and searched out our names, each of us seemed to know just where to look in the parapet.
With the rush of emotion that we felt at discovering “ourselves” on the concrete support, came floods of memories that we lovingly shared, memories that bind us as a unit as strong and steadfast as the ancient concrete itself. It made me know the truth in an old quote; that we were “cousins by blood but friends by choice.
I feel a sorrow for the children of today. They are growing into adulthood in a nucleus family which lives unto itself. With no relatives, no support and that puts the child and that tiny family unit in an impossible situation. Few of them will ever relate to a bumper sticker I chanced to read recently. It said: “In the cookies of life, cousins are the chocolate chips.”
Family folklore taught me as a child that “persons” grow on family trees. It taught me that we had unique family expressions, food, mementos and “inside jokes” that no one else could ever possibly find amusing because they didn’t know the history of the anecdote. The maternal side of my family was small compared to Dad’s side. In fact I’m still meeting people that are third, fourth and fifth cousins. And then there are the first cousins once removed.
Usually people were just identified to me that they were “cousins”. No one ever explained the degrees of cousins; maybe because it was too confusing to them too. I actually found a chart recently that defines the bewildering subject. For example a first cousin has two of the same grandparents as you would. Second cousins share the same great-grandparents, third cousins have the same great-great grandparents and fourth cousins have the same great-great-great grandparents and so on.
When the word “removed” is used to describe a relationship, it indicates that the people are from different generations. I and my first cousins are the same generation (or two generations younger than our grandparents) so “removed” is not used to describe our relationship.
The words “once removed” means that there is a difference of one generation. An example being that my Mother’s first cousin would be my first cousin “once removed”. This is because I am one generation younger than my Mother’s cousin. And twice removed means two generations difference.
“Removed” and “once removed” wasn’t used much in Mother’s family but I heard the term frequently in Daddy’s. Possibly because that part of the family tree had some roots that ran deeply into the southern side of the Mason-Dixon line.
I knew a lady once that was forever referring to her “Kissing Cousins” and I never quite knew what that term meant. Upon doing some research on the subject I discovered the term is understood in different ways to different people. It can mean Cousins that know each other well enough that they greet each other with a kiss. Cousins that are not related by blood (they have married into your family) thus they become “kissable” by marriage. And then there are the cousins that actually marry each other, such as Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Or our own Jesse James that married his first cousin Zerelda “Zee” Mimms.
I grew up believing that they had married what I was taught to know as “Forbidden Relatives”. In this country there is actual legislation against marriage between first cousins based on biological risk to the offspring.
Now it comes to light that there were no European countries that prohibited such marriages and that it was done in America to promote more rapid absorption of the immigrants. As mentioned before, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were prime examples of first cousin marriages which proved to be a great love story. Unfortunately their grandchildren went to war with each other in World War 1. Few of us ever pause to think that Russia, England, Germany, etc; were ruled by “cousins”, talk about a family feud.
Life moves on but sometimes repeats itself in small ways. In my back yard lies concrete impressions of my nine grandchildren’s hand prints. A Mother’s Day gift from them a couple of years ago. What a priceless treasure they are to me and I am searching for the proper spot to install them in the landscape here on the Creek. A special spot that they can stroll to in their later years to search out their hand prints and recall their individual memories about good times with their “cousins” The cousins that are different beautiful flowers all from the same garden.
