Childhood Friends

When you're growing up, you tend to think of your life and all its situations as "normal". So I thought it was normal that everybody had a lot of cousins. It wasn't until later in my life that I realize what a blessing it was to have grown up with such a large extended family. My mother came from a large family, so on her side alone I had 42 first cousins! All but 11 of them lived in the same town that we did, and two others were close by.

We would see each other regularly throughout the year and the annual family picnic was something we all looked forward to. But I especially remember that 3 or 4 of the families (ours was one) would get together frequently for birthdays. With that many people, somebody was always having a birthday. The two cousins I played with most were Melissa and Cathe. They were really more like friends than family.

Melissa and I are the same age. She lived about 7 or 8 blocks north of my house. In the summer, I would ride my bike over to her house. We would play on the monkey bars in the back yard while her mom and dad would sit in the screened-in porch behind the garage. When I went home, I would borrow a few Nancy Drew books (Melissa had the WHOLE set!) and put them in my bike basket. I so clearly remember a couple of the neatest things about her house: it had a laundry chute down to the basement and her mom had a small table and chairs in the kitchen that were just our size. This is a picture of Melissa (on the right) and me in our first communion dresses.


Cathe is a year younger than us, but a good friend as well. She lived about 10 or 11 blocks to the south. When I went to her house, I would load my bike basket up with Sears, Penney's, or Montgomery Ward catalogs and my favorite scissors. We would play cut-out dolls on her living room floor. Cathe was my idol. She could tell by the feel of the paper dress which catalog it came from! Her mom was neat and would sometimes play with us. I was also amazed at her mom because she had a sewing machine and she would make Barbie Doll clothes. She is one of the two people from my childhood that made me interested in sewing. In the picture here, Cathe is the one on the left...coloring Easter eggs with me and my sister.

I'm sharing all this with you because I am so excited. Melissa and Cathe are coming to visit at the end of this month! Yea! We are doing the grown-up version of getting on our bikes and coming to play. We all grew up in Streator, Illinois and they both now live in Rockford, Illinois. We've been saying, "We should get together some time". Well, now it's actually going to happen and I am really looking forward to it. Cathe and I have been e-mailing old family photos back and forth for a while now and so we're going to work on some family history scrapbooks and fill in some blanks for each other. We'll also do some touristy things since she's never been to Atlanta. Melissa isn't much into scrapbooking, but she also has some neat old family photos to share and plans to pretty much hang out, as she says, "On the veranda sipping mint juleps". That's her idea of spending time in the south and it sounds good to me.