Lady Old Lane and Double Second Cousins Once Removed

itunes is working again. I can listen to music while I write. Yahoo! I'm shamlessly backdating the month of July.

Ashes to ashes by David Bowie is playing.

When I went to Chicago to visit my brother's family and my parents, I stopped by my cousin Amy's house for a night. I love seeing cousins and I love seeing my kids connect with their cousins.

We use the term cousin rather loosely. Cousins are people related you. Some of them are in their nineties and some of them are babies. Since our kids have just two first cousins, we don't spend a lot of time differentiating between the types of cousins. Cousins are people who feel familiar in some way or another. First cousins feel more so.

Sumner and Ramona loved visiting their cousins Olivia and Joseph. Sumner was ready to move in for a few weeks with them. At one point he said, "Can we just move to Illinois [instead of New Orleans]?" He felt safe and comfy with Joe and Olivia.

Ramona loved the cookies in abundant supply, which I let her eat before noon, and the fireworks, which made her dance and run in wide circles around the driveway. She also felt comfortable. She was herself after about an hour warm up.

I remember my chance encounters with cousins, some older, some younger, throughout the years. They always make an impression, even when they are few and far between

About a week after we were there I noticed that Ramona's Neighborhood of Make Believe paper puppets had been labeled on the back side. There was "X the Olwe", Denieal Striped Tiger", "Meow Pussycat", "Queen Sarah", "Tim Son", and "Lady Old Lane". I asked Ramona who wrote this, because I could tell that it wasn't Sumner's work. She looked and said, "My cousin," with a like-obviously-mom tone.

These little labels may be the impression this visit with Olivia leaves with her, like Amy's tiny minatures on a tiny shelf made an impression on me when I was a little girl. And one day Ramona will be traveling thru someplace, somewhere and decide to bunk with her cousin and it will all come back. That familiarity.