Overheard in the Churchyard (Family Reunion, Part III)

-Mama, taking in her surroundings: "Anna, all these people are your relatives. I suggest you marry outside of Virginia."
-Butch, a relative by marriage and truly lovable character who lives in his family's old plantation home and refers to Natural Light as "the poor man's Budweiser": "So, Chicago, eh? Couldn't you find a school any closer? Let me tell you, I went to Chicago twice in my life. Both times was a mistake."
-Man serving my vegetarian cousins from Chicago and me dinner, in a shocked tone: "No chicken? Just coleslaw, potatoes, and rolls?"
-Aunt Cindy, fan of exaggeration and sinner for bringing booze in her trunk to the Methodist parking lot: "You watch out for them Spiers who crashed the party. There's some incest there, and I'm not just talkin' cousins marrying cousins...I'm talkin' the real deal."
-A relative surveying the gravestones: "Well, Spiers married Crawford, Crawford married Spiers, and then Spiers married Spiers!"

Perhaps I should elaborate on the Spiers, a branch of the family from my great grandmother's side, but a picture's worth a thousand words, so here goes:

The Spiers Folks

I found amongst the photos a "Robert E. Lee Spiers," but in the cemetery, I saw that his grave read, "Robert Emmett Spiers," so I will pretend that the caption was someone's idea of a joke and leave it at that.

In the Spiers's defense, I met a wonderful elderly Spiers lady who lives in Kentucky, Mama's home state, who years ago visited my parents when she heard that they had come to be with Mama's father in the hospital. I'd heard of this relative long before from a story my parents love to tell, about how, for some reason, my dad was confused and thought that the visiting cousin was my mother's, not his, so when Mary mentioned the name, "Spiers," Dad turned white as a sheet, thinking he'd married a Spiers, one of his distant cousins! It was great to finally put a face
to the story—Mary was a sweet woman.

While I enjoyed visiting with my first cousins (most live in other parts of Virginia, some in Chicago), making connections about the numerous cousins and branches of the family, listening to the thick New York accents of relatives from Queens, and hearing people share old stories, it was sad to think that the exact same group of people would never be together in one place again. One elderly relative, Merryl, who had come all the way from Texas to be there in that tiny church in rural Southern Virginia was delighted to meet my sisters and me, and it made me tear up a bit when she waved goodbye to know that I will probably never cross paths with her, Mary, or maybe even Bill and Carolyn again. I feel like I will never know as much as some relatives do about my family history (perhaps an anthropological project for me can be an oral history of my family?). Still, I cherish the reunion for bringing me closer to everyone, if only for that one evening.

Family Album (Family Reunion, Part II)

Saturday afternoon, we got caught in a huge thunderstorm as we drove through winding country roads, past fields of tobacco and soy beans, by an old, faded green, run-down house where my great grandfather grew up, to Oak Grove Methodist Church. Running from our cars to the church to escape the downpour, we were greeted inside by my grandfather, who instructed us to put on nametags (again, it was a huge gathering!). Before all the relatives started pouring in, I spent time looking into the Sunday School room where a bunch of old family photographs were displayed on tables. I learned a lot about my ancestors in that room:

Some of them had style.


Some were mothers.


Some were Ivy Leaguers.


Some were glamorous.


Some had friends of all kinds.


Some let others do all of the hard work.


Some were nudists in their youth.


Some, I would’ve liked to have laughed with.


Some were studs.


Some seemed a little eccentric.


And some were soulmates.

The Guests Arrive (Family Reunion, Part I)

This past Saturday, my family had a MASSIVE reunion, and I'm not just talking first cousins—I met relatives from branches of the family that I didn't even know existed. We have some relatives who live in New York, as well as the more Southern branches of the family here in Virginia, so it was an interesting blend of characters. My grandfather organized it all, and the reunion was held in an old country Methodist church near where my Great Great Great Uncle Cab was run over by a train. (How sentimental.)

Cousin Robert from Queens stayed in our house with his wife, Margie. Cousin Robert wears massive rings and gold bracelets, and slicks his hair over his bald spot. While his extremely loud New York voice booms out-of-place in our quiet town, there's something endearing about him—he tells hilarious (and exaggerated, I'm sure!) stories. He brings down chocolate truffles and (used to bring us) DVDs of questionable legality that my paranoid mother would always end sticking in the microwave as soon as he left to "destroy the evidence." (If you're an FBI agent who happens to be reading this, then don't get your underpants all in a twist, because he brought us real DVDs this year—perhaps he's made better friends who don't run sketchy movie stores.)

Margie is an angel—she uses expressions such as "Crumbs!" when she's agitated and "Oh my glory!" when she's surprised. While she was ecstatic to visit us for the first time in years, she missed her beloved cats (they don't have children) back home. (As I recall from a trip when I was very young, she fed them from a glass goblet.) Her eyes are beautiful and friendly, and she positively radiates joy and kindness.

On short notice, we found out that we would host two additional guests, Cousin Robert's brother and his wife who own a horse farm in Ohio. While it was hectic preparing another room for them, they were lovely people—Bill has caterpillar eyebrows, a friendly smile, and a booming voice (most likely due to his loss of hearing), and Carolyn has crinkly eyes and a soothing accent. Despite a recent freak accident on the farm that involved one horse bleeding halfway to death after another one kicked him, they (Bill and Carolyn, that is, not the horses, I imagine) were in good spirits. I enjoyed hearing Bill tell old family stories into the late hours of the night, especially the ones about his time as a trade school student in Chicago. He told me that the appeal of the city wore off after a few years (and bitter cold winters) for him—he hadn't fallen in love with Chicago like I have.

Greetings from the South

So here's the deal—before leaving Chicago to come home for the summer, I told some of my friends that I would start a blog. A few friends were writing travel blogs, as they were spending their summers abroad, and I figured that rural Southern Virginia might as well be a foreign country (at least in comparison to Chicago), so why not report back from it? However, my summer job as a camp counselor at the Summer Enrichment Program (SEP) at UVA left me with little time to start blogging. Now that I'm home with over a month to go before I'm back to UChicago, I need something to prevent myself from dying from boredom in a county that has only one stoplight, so here I am! We'll see where this goes.