JUNE 9, FRIDAY

FAMILIES

This weekend my sister Anne’s two sons, Ted and Mike, got together in Asheville with their families and invited, Katie, my brother’s daughter and my two children, Susie and Tom, who are already here, to join them. Katie wasn’t able to come. We all got together on Saturday night at Tom’s house. Anne died during the pandemic and Ted died in 2010. My other brother Richard doesn’t have any children.

I guess my parents family is a pretty typical family. After graduating from college and two years in the army, I came to Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa for the rest of my life. My brother Ted was in the army after college and then worked in military intelligence in the Washington area for the rest of his life. My sister Anne married Mike Wimsatt, a surgeon, and after they divorced, after about 15 years of marriage, she stayed in Lewistown, Pennsylvania for the rest of her life. My brother Richard married late and has no children. His wife is from Saint Paul, Minnesota, and although they have lived in New York, they have have spent most of their lives together in Saint Paul. My parents continued to live in New York until my father became ill and they moved to Highland Farms near my home where my mother lived for the last 20 years of her life.

I don’t know the distances precisely but Washington is about 500 miles away, Lewistown 600 miles away, Ithaca 600 miles away, St. Paul maybe 1000 miles away. This meant during our college years when we would come home for Christmas and the summer, then later before marriage we came home to Ithaca at Christmas time, but after marriage in our twenties we have seen each other once or sometimes twice a year. As an old woman my mother came to live near us, but in a retirement home where Kathe and I would have Sunday dinner with her once a week.

For Kathe and me it was different. Tom before and after marriage has lived in Asheville and Susie, after wandering for a few years, married Todd and lives an hour away in a little cabin in Madison County. I saw both of them yesterday at the gathering Tom and Kathy arranged at their house, then Susie spent the night here and we went to a movie in Asheville, Vermeer Up Close, which we wanted to see since it connected us with our recent visit to Haarlem. So I see my children often.

My next door neighbor’s four children are scattered from California to Ohio to New York State and my neighbors are continually going on week long trips to visit them and sometimes, rarely, their children come from California, 3000 miles, or New York 600 miles or Ohio 500 miles to visit here. The Collins have a family cabin in Vermont where there children and other family members occasionally visit in the summer.

When we all met last night we had a great time catching up with each other. Susie and I had seen Mike and Kathy in New York a month ago but it had been two years since we had all gotten together. For a while before my mother died all of the extended family that could, cousins on all sides, would meet at Highland Lake Inn near Hendersonville once a year for a summer get together.

This is just the way that many American families are, spread out across the country and only getting together once or twice a year. Not many families live as close as Tom, Susie and I live and I am very grateful for their presence.

Almost all my friends in their 80’s live alone, as I do, but with their families scattered. My family is right here. But this separation is just the American way and for those whose children go to college, this first separation leads to wider and wider separation.

Kathe’s family was even more dispersed. The children grew up in WW2. Kathe’s older sister needed to go to England to find work as a nurse and stayed their and became a British citizen, Kathe came to American and married me and lived her all her life but stayed a German citizen, brother Hinnerk married and lived an hour away by train and Volker lived in the close by town of Celle. But somehow even with these great distances I think that Kathe’s family remained more tightly bonded than mine did. Even now my three German nieces, Kathe’s brother’s daughters, seem to have a greater need for close family ties when they welcome us back to Germany and Holland as they did a couple of months ago then my American nieces and nephews do. I think it is cultural. Germans bond more tightly and Americans, who believe strongly in independence and individualism, encourage their children to leave the nest and go off on their own in a way most cultures don’t as much.

In Assi Ghat the Indian family that ran the hotel I stayed in for years all lived of a hallway on the second floor, the parents and four families with a number of kids apiece, eating together and living in cramped spaces. It would drive Americans nuts, but the extended family is really an extended family, a tight extended family in India. My friend Hasmukh’s son lives in Johnson City, Tennessee but he and his parents are still a tight extended family and this week Hasmukh’s doctor brother’s family is visiting from India and they are all going to New York City where they will celebrate with more extended family.

I am am not arguing that one form of family is better than another. I do think that we are formed by the culture we grow up in which determines the kind of family that we will be brought up in.

All I am really doing now when looking at the way our cousins get together every year or two like last night or families disperse and rarely see each other is I am just becoming more aware of this pattern and seeing it from the outside and wondering about it. It seems to me looked at objectively to be a rather strange pattern. We loved each other so dearly when children and were so dependent on each other in the family, how could we have then felt so comfortable with dispersing so widely and seeing each other once or twice a year and then casually saying goodbye, see you next year, or the year after.