My Uncle Jack, Cousin Candi, Aunt Kitty, and me
Last week my cousin Candi reached out to me via Facebook and invited me to have dinner with her and her parents, my Uncle Jack and Aunt Kitty, in Maggie Valley, NC, just 35 miles west of Asheville, close to the Tennessee border.
This doesn’t sound particularly remarkable until you consider that I hadn’t laid eyes on Candi since she was nine years old, and the last time I saw her father was almost 16 years ago.
Jack is my birthmother’s brother, whom I met for the first time the summer I graduated from college, when I flew to Florida to be introduced to my maternal relatives. It was then my grandmother’s birthday — I believe her 70th — and last weekend was Jack’s 81st.
Despite not having seen Candi since she was a spunky, spindly-legged youngster, and her parents in many years, they were so kind and welcoming that it felt natural to spend a late summer afternoon with them, in their lovely home in the woods, with the whoosh of a creek emanating from the backyard.
Jack and Kitty live in Florida (their other daughter Christine also lives there) most of the year, in the condo that once belonged to my grandmother, but come up to their mountain home in Maggie Valley a few months out of the year to escape the heat. I asked them how they discovered this small town nestled in the Great Smokies, and they told me they drove through Kentucky, North Carolina, and Georgia searching for a retirement home when they were enchanted by this tiny resort area named for a young local girl with dark blonde hair and blue eyes.
Speaking of light eyes, everyone on my birthmother’s side has them — big bedroom peepers tinted deep blue or green, rimmed with long, dark lashes. I inherited my birthfather’s southern Italian coloring, although I always wished I’d gotten my mother’s blue eyes. But I did get the thick, wavy hair that everyone on her side has.
At 81, Jack still has quite the head of hair
Also, freckles. Everyone on that side has freckles, and while mine have coagulated into one giant age spot, The Daughter inherited them and wears them well, as you can see below.
The Freckled Daughter at Beaver Lake in Asheville
Freckles aside, my relatives and I somehow caught up on the intervening decades between reunions — the jobs, children, homes, relocations, and life that had transpired. I learned that Kitty also loves to write about family history, and published a book about her own family of origin (she was one of eight children!). I love her dedication, which aptly describes why those of us who write about our roots do what we do:
“This book is dedicated to our past generations so they are not forgotten and to future generations so they can remember.”
We went out to J. Arthur’s, Jack’s favorite restaurant, to celebrate his birthday. While we ate, I glanced overhead at the Christmas display: “snow”-covered toy houses perched on a ledge all year round, and a toy train that ran around tracks. I thought of the other occasions I’d spent with various members of this family that is my blood, but that I didn’t grow up with: some weddings, some birthdays, a Thanksgiving, an Easter.
I remembered the cake my birthmother made in the shape and likeness of my grandmother’s face, the whimsical Easter basket she’d prepared for my son on a freezing cold, rainy April morning in upstate New York. I remembered standing against a wainscoted wall talking to Uncle Jack at my sister’s wedding, and here we were now, conversing across the table as he ate his ice cream sundae.
This birthday celebration felt at once special — my uncle is 81, I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t found my birthmother 40 years ago, or if I, like Jack and Kitty, hadn’t gravitated to the ancient mountains of North Carolina — and ordinary. Because to the waiter, we were just another family gathering to acknowledge the passing of just another year.
The last couple days I’ve been searching through photo albums and boxes of unhoused pictures, trying in vain to excavate the snapshots from that first extended family reunion on my grandmother’s birthday, 39 years ago. I did have a really unfortunate hairstyle then — I’d chopped off my signature long locks in a rebel-without-a-cause impulse — so maybe it’s best that I can’t memorialize them.
But I did find this photo of the couple that launched all of us: my stunningly gorgeous grandparents on their wedding day in 1934.
My grandfather died before I met him, but I like to think that he, along with my grandmother, would have been happy knowing that in a steakhouse in the mountains of western North Carolina, generations of the family they created were gathering to celebrate one of their own.
"Spirits are using me, larger voices calling..."
This is so beautiful! More later.