We Are Family

We were born three months and one week and sixty-five miles apart, my cousin Cindy and I. We married 361 days apart. And yet, we have always been different.

Cindy’s father–one of my mother’s younger brothers–and his family moved to the South after she was born, but they later returned to my hometown for a few years before moving to Wisconsin, where Cindy and her husband and two daughters still live. This photo was taken by her dad, a professional photographer, when we were five or so. Even then, we looked very different. We do today as well; I’m six feet tall and tower over her.

We’re different in other ways. I’m good with words and with math; Cindy’s good with her hands and with animals.

I’m the family historian. I keep track of our two dozen or so Revolutionary War ancestors. I can tell you where in England they all came from, and stories about the time our many-times-great-grandmother Polly shot the bear and the day our grandparents were married along with Grandma’s sister and her husband.

Cindy, on the other hand, is our family’s soul. She’s the one you can be sure will call or write if you or another cousin or uncle or aunt is sick. When she heard I was having trouble with my shoulder, she gave me long-distance healing that is still helping months later. She did the same for her father for months before he died last summer.

For while I have the memory gene, Cindy has the kindness and thoughtfulness gene. I burst into tears years ago when I heard she’d given her older daughter the middle name Dawn, for Cindy’s sister who died in her crib when we were just five. I teared up again last summer after her dad’s funeral when Cindy told me she wanted the two of us to be sisters, the kind of sisters she thinks she and Dawn would have been.

So we are different, my cousin and I. But we are two sides of a coin, two aspects of a wonderfully diverse family. I love her. And Cindy, this is the best way I can tell you that.