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He Is Gathered to His People
In Memoriam
My dad’s cousin Jim died. He was a year older than my dad. He and my dad and my dad’s brother and my dad’s cousin’s brother and all the other daughters and sons of their many mutual uncles and aunts all grew up together in a sort of horde.
Their parents, collectively, were nine siblings from the same Nebraska farming family, and eight of those nine siblings — all but the very oldest brother — had moved to the same small farm town in the middle of California’s central valley in the 1930s and 1940s. Eight brothers and sisters, all relocating en masse to this little orchard town on the Santa Fe railroad tracks, all farming side by side and raising children together.
My dad and all his cousins picked peaches every summer, in one uncle’s orchard or another’s. They all went through school together, their kindred making up probably half of any particular graduating class. My dad’s little brother, born in the 1950s, was the last scion of those grinning, good-natured Nebraska brothers and sisters to come up through that welter of cousins, that web of interconnected households that all lived together as one large extended and ever-expanding family.
Not everyone has a family experience like this. In fact, few people do these days. My own children did not grow up among this moiling mass of cousins and…
