Cousins

When I was in Texas last week, I got to see a couple of my cousins. Growing up, my brother and I had two dozen cousins, two of whom were double cousins. Most of them lived in the area around Tyler, and we saw them a lot. There were usually family gatherings at the homes of both sets of grandparents at Christmas as well as other times. My father's mother celebrated her birthday on July 4, and the Dodd clan all gathered at the lake on their farm for a big party and to get the first bad sunburn of the year lying on air mattresses out on the water. Ted and I often spent another week or two visiting my mother's side of the family during the summer, and cousins came to visit with us for a week or so with some regularity.

My father's brother Weldon (whom everyone called Buddy), his wife and their two children -- Phyllis and Rex -- lived about a mile from us in Huntsville, though, and they were the cousins we saw all the time. Yesterday Phyllis and her husband, Daryl, stopped in Wisconsin Dells on their way to Door County, and I gave them a tour of the place and they treated me to a very nice dinner. We all agreed that we look like our parents. Phyllis looks very much like her mother. Daryl is clearly the son of his father, who taught me drivers ed and civics in high school.

Since they, like almost all of the family but yours truly, live in Texas, I seldom see them. It was good to catch up. They were impressed with the natural beauty of the Dells, not so impressed by the water-park-junky-tourist-trappy stuff. I think they will come back though so that we can go out on the river and see the Dells that gave the place its name.