List: List of Friendly Reminders for a Friendly Family Reunion

My family has been gathering at the same island, Edisto Island, in South Carolina, since 1950, really before that because my parents vacationed there before the first of us "kids " was born in 1937, my great grandmother wrote about a visit to this island in 1910, and my grandfather's roommate lived there. My grandfather died in 1933, so his college roommate was a way of hearing about a man I never knew. As eight kids, we went to Edisto every August for a month, and it was a wondrous time of family, fun, fishing and... mosquitoes. But the decades have rolled over us with the tides, and so much has changed in spite of our efforts to hold back the clock. As they say, "Time and tides wait for no man." My dad died in 1969, our house burned in 1970, our old boat we ten could take out day after day for fishing was just too old to restore and ended up stranded and reluctantly abandoned on a marsh island, my mother died in 1991. What would happen to our family as the horizon of our lives was altered so irretrievably? Would we kids on our own continue to find a way to get together each August?

We have continued to gather, but it is complicated in ways it never was in our one old house with no plumbing or electricity but with the most splendid marsh views and the ocean breaking just a little while away. We will gather again in two weeks. Am I looking forward to it? Of course. Am I dreading it? Of course. Will I be melancholy? Yes. Will I be celebrating? Yes. We have not missed a year in all these decades. Although every sibling can not make every year, we are usually all there. This year we have a brother who is too ill to travel, and he has probably been there for his last time. That gives us pause--for a lot of reasons. Every year when our time together has ended, and I leave South Carolina and head my car north, for many years to Pennsylvania, now to North Carolina, I am very pensive as I drive away from this marker time for the passages of our lives. Who would we be when next we gathered? There are too many of us for there not to be challenges each year, and would be be the same when we returned? There was the year our dad died or the house burned; there were the years my own house burned, my grandchild died. Each year when we come back, each of us is a different person, and we begin again to renegotiate the space and to find constancy in a changing world. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

At first, after we lost our house, we would all rent a house together. We got up to thirty of us in one house, but let's just say it got really tight. That's when my brothers were still bachelors, and one of them would be sleeping on every sofa or flat area while the married couples got a real bedroom. I think it was the in laws who first said it was getting absurd. I mean we would do anything to spend time together, but our new husbands or wives were less enamored with the idea of sharing two bathrooms with thirty people. So we began to rent, or in some cases, buy houses there and gather for one week, and that alleviated the line for the bathrooms.

Once one of my young sons said to me at Edisto, "Mom, you know how I know I want to be good?" I was obviously very alert to what he would say. " Well, at home it's just you and Dad telling me what I am supposed to do and it feels more like a lecture, but here I see all my aunts and uncles making the same choices, and somehow it helps me understand, and I want it for myself too." Extended family gives a child a sense of family values that even parents alone can not give.

When you go to your family reunion, here are some things to keep in mind:

!) Just because you love someone doesn't mean you don't both need some space. It just works better if there is still hot water for a shower or a place to sit when you are weary.

2) As we get older, we seem to be more different. There are definitely different personality styles in our family. Some like to talk about our personal lives, and others do not think vacation is a time to dredge out all the serious stuff. Respect each other.

3) As we get older, we seem to be more alike. The older we get, and our eight birth dates are from 1937 to 1953, the more we value our shared memories of our childhoods, of the weeks out at our marsh creek home, the memories that spouses, children, friends and other people in our lives can not know. We shared a history together and that inevitably shaped us. Value the few people in your life who knew you as a child.

4) Celebrate generations. Bringing our little children was a lot easier than enticing our teens or adult children to come. It was great fun when we all had little children for the cousins to play together in the sand and in the ocean. As our own children have grown up, they have each developed their own personalities, they have jobs and college and boyfriends, and it is hard to create any common time that will suit all. I have a niece who is coming to Edisto for two days literally on her way from Alaska to England. The third generation often only makes it there for the big weekend, but we love having three generations together.

5) We are very accomplished people in our professional lives, but somehow here we can not a make a decision without endless discussion. We laugh at ourselves, but we still can discuss a simple fishing trip as if we were in charge of some world treaty. There are just so many agendas of boats, cars, babysitting for little ones, supper, spouses leaving spouses behind with the chores. No matter how hard we may try,fifty people will not fit in one boat. Try to reserve time to talk without logistics dominating.

6) Pecking order is only dormant. When you go home to family, you slide back into your position in the birth order. This is not entirely true, but you sure see vestiges of the old pecking order. I am fifth down, fourth up in birth order, and that begins to feel like a familiar place for me again.

7) Primogeniture is obsolete. We grew up in the traditional South, and there was a hint of that still around. We had an antique family table that had been passed form oldest son to oldest son for 150 years, but my oldest brother never married, so where does the table go now? I am glad to say that in our family, age has faded as an issue--usually. The fifties and sixties are great levelers. I do think there should always be respect for the older generation and its experience, but there should also be respect for each generation.

8) When there are fifty people in your family, you will leave feeling like, yes, you saw everyone, but, no, you didn't really see anyone. This makes me a little crazy. Try to create moments of one on one conversation.

9) If you are on a diet, don't roll your eyes when someone else is splurging on his/her vacation. To each his own.... One of the things I am 'dreading' is that we do low carb, my daughter does Weight Watchers, and my other daughter does low calorie with a lot of cheating but exercises a lot. It makes it hard to plan a dinner together.

10) Keep in mind that for some financial ease is more elusive than for others and try to respect that. You can have as much fun at a cheap place for dinner as an expensive place. Don't exclude family by your choice of restaurants. The food will fade, but family remains.

11) Just like Mom always said, "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." It just doesn't work. If you talk about a relative behind his/her back, somehow it will get back to the person, and you can't take words back.

12) You don't have to go to church on Sunday. Some may, none must. We grew up going to church there every Sunday; there were years our children sang in a group in the little island church, and those are favorite memories. Now many rentals end on Sunday morning, and I think God will understand packing, cleaning and spending last moments with people you may not see for months, even all year.

13) Cherish the time you have together. Life is too short to let anything, short of abuse, come between family members permanently. Always have your sense of humor at a reunion. Once at one of our reunions, my brother's girlfriend, now his wife of forty years, fixed my brother a big, generous sandwich for their trip home and put it in a brown paper bag. When they were ready to leave, the sandwich was gone and no one would admit to the apparent indiscretion. The girl friend was just a little miffed. A month later, my ten year old brother presented my little sister with a birthday present of 25 fireballs in a brown paper bag. Imagine her surprise when she opened the bag and found, instead of shiny red fireballs, a smelly, moldy sandwich. It was a priceless moment which vindicated our family from suspicion snd humor saved the day. Remember that sometimes when it appears that everyone is fibbing to you, it is just a misunderstanding.

14) Record your time there as a family so those who come behind you will begin to understand who you were. I wrote a 55 page narrative of our days there in the early years, and even my youngest sister discovered stories she never heard. There are stories that should be handed down in your family. In these days of e-mail, less and less 'hard copy' will survive our times together. Some have read my memoir, some have not, but I feel good knowing it exists. Make a point of recording stories and gathering pictures for future generations.

15 There are new houses, new boats, new docks, and we all have electricity and plumbing and even air conditioning. New is good, but the old times were good also. For me, everything I needed to learn, I learned at Edisto. Honor the teachers of your life.